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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 distinctly modern sense of self-hood and subjectivity, and of the individualist liberal society in which such a self takes shape, emerges from the drama and poetry of the early seventeenth century. John Milton, writer of the greatest long poem in English, Paradise Lost, takes up the challenge of modern character and social formation from Shakespeare and Donne and their contemporaries. He begins this task in his own early maturity, some thirty years before the publication of his great epic, with A Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle, more commonly 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 Labyrinth fills a major gap in Milton and Renaissance criticism. It comprehensively surveys, evaluates, and integrates recent and traditional criticism of Comus in the context of Milton's other work, while developing new directions for study, focusing anthropological and psychological analysis on the poems characters and mythological dimensions. Parallels between the ritual elements of the Maske and the rites of passage of non-European cultures will widen the horizons of both canonically based and multi-culturally engaged scholars and writers. The books study of Milton's identification with his female hero, and his advocacy of women's ethical, sexual, and political autonomy, gives a jolt to ongoing debates about Milton and feminism.
The first of Milton's heroes of Christian Liberty, the fifteen-year-old Lady who performs in his Maske is also the first of his characters to act out this transformation of human identity. Lady in the Labyrinth treats Comus, first performed in 1634, as a rite of passage for its Lady, and for the emerging culture 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 modern self-hood in its very moment of emergence. The ritual ordeal of the Lady transforms her from a scared girl lost in the forest into a model of the free-thinking, conscience-governed citizen of English Puritan culture. The Lady's lyric power, prophetic argument, and ethical consistency prepare the way for women's participation in the emerging"public sphere" of modern society and in the reformation of largely patriarchal literary histories. The exemplary imaginative and social importance 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 Campbell Chair in the Humanities at Sarah Lawrence College. He received his BA from Yale University, and his MA and PhD from the University of Massachusetts. From 1992 to 1994, he was a Fulbright Senior Lecturer in American Literature at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, and he has twice directed an NEH Summer Seminar in "The Classical and the Modern Epic" Homers Iliad and Walcott's 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. He has published articles on Milton, Donne, Herbert, Vaughan and Crashaw,Wordsworth, Keats, and Dickinson, as well as miscellaneous poems and translations. |
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| Scholarly Reviews | |
Gordon Teskey - SEL 50 1
Lana Cable The University at Albany - Christianity and Literature
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