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FDU PRESS
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| Lady in the Labyrinth: Milton's Comus as Initiation |
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Author - William Shullenberger
Publication Date - October 2009
Number of Pages - 361
ISBN #9780838641743
Contents
Price $65.00 - Price subject to change
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| Description |
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Modern literary scholarship has traced the ways in which a distinctlymodern sense of selfhood and subjectivity, and of the individualistliberal society in which such a self takes shape, emerges from thedrama and poetry of the early seventeenth century. John Milton, writerof the greatest long poem in English, Paradise Lost,takes up the challenge of modern character and social formation fromShakespeare and Donne and their contemporaries. He begins this task inhis own early maturity, some thirty years before the publication of hisgreat epic, with A Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle, more.com monly known as Comus.
There has not been a major book-length study of Milton's Maske in the past twenty years, so Lady in the Labyrinthfills a major gap in Milton and Renaissance criticism. It.com prehensively surveys, evaluates, and integrates recent and traditionalcriticism of Comus in thecontext of Miltons other work, while developing new directions forstudy, focusing anthropological and psychological analysis on the poemscharacters and mythological dimensions. Parallels between the ritualelements of the Maske and therites of passage of non-European cultures will widen the horizons ofboth canonically based and multiculturally engaged scholars andwriters. The books study of Miltons identification with his femalehero, and his advocacy of womens ethical, sexual, and politicalautonomy, gives a jolt to ongoing debates about Milton and feminism.
The first of Miltons heroes of Christian Liberty, the fifteen-year-oldLady who performs in his Maske is also the first of his characters toact out this transformation of human identity. Lady in the Labyrinthtreats Comus, first performedin 1634, as a rite of passage for its Lady, and for the emergingculture whose hopes are invested in her. Displaying in song, argument,and dance such character qualities as interiority, self-consciousness,flexibility, and independence, the Lady gives vital form to modernselfhood in its very moment of emergence. The ritual ordeal of the Ladytransforms her from a scared girl lost in the forest into a model ofthe free-thinking, conscience-governed citizen of English Puritanculture. The Ladys lyric power, prophetic argument, and ethicalconsistency prepare the way for womens participation in the emerging"public sphere" of modern society and in the reformation of largelypatriarchal literary histories. The exemplary imaginative and socialimportance of the Lady thus makes the Maske a startling founding gesture of early modern feminism.
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| Author/Editor Biographies |
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| William Shullenberger is Professor of Literature and Joseph CampbellChair in the Humanities at Sarah Lawrence College. He received his BAfrom Yale University, and his MA and PhD from the University ofMassachusetts. From 1992 to 1994, he was a Fulbright Senior Lecturer inAmerican Literature at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, and hehas twice directed an NEH Summer Seminar in "The Classical and theModern Epic" Homers Illiad and Walcotts Omeros." He is co-author, with Bonnie Shullenberger, of Africa Time: Two Scholars Seasons in Uganda (1998), and has co-edited the volumes Literature and Belief 19, I (1999): The Tradition of Metaphysical Poetry and Belief; Milton Studies 28 (1992): Riven Unities: Authority and Experience, Self and Other in Miltons Poetry; and Massachusetts Studies in English 7, 4 (1981): Emily Dickinson. Hehas published articles on Milton, Donne, Herbert, Vaughan and Crashaw,Wordsworth, Keats, and Dickinson, as well as miscellaneous poems andtranslations. |
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