What in Me Is Dark
The Revolutionary Afterlife of Paradise Lost
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4.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A highly original hybrid of literary criticism and political history, telling of the enduring, surprising and ever-evolving relevance of Milton’s epic poem through the scandalous life of its creator and the revolutionary lives that were influenced by it.
What in Me Is Dark tells the unlikely story of how Milton’s epic poem came to haunt political struggles over the past four centuries, including the many different, unexpected, often contradictory ways in which it has been read, interpreted, and appropriated through time and across the world, and to revolutionary ends. The book focuses on twelve readers—including Malcolm X, Thomas Jefferson, George Eliot, Hannah Arendt, and C.L.R James—whose lives demonstrate extraordinary and disturbing influence on the modern age.
Drawing from his own experiences teaching Paradise Lost in New Jersey prisons, English scholar Orlando Reade deftly investigates how the poem was read by people embedded in struggles against tyranny, slavery, colonialism, gender inequality, and capitalist exploitation. It is experimental nonfiction at its finest; rich literary analysis and social, cultural and political history are woven together to make a clarifying case for the undeniable impact of the poem.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this excellent debut study, Reade, an English professor at Northeastern University London, traces the legacy of John Milton's 1667 epic poem Paradise Lost by examining its influence on 12 famous figures. Arguing that Thomas Jefferson related to the depiction of Satan's revolutionary zeal, Reade notes that while serving as American ambassador to France in the 1780s, the future president wrote that Milton's unrhyming poetry represented an "expression of freedom" from the fetters of tradition, complementing in style the content of Satan's speeches against heaven's tyranny. Elsewhere, Reade describes how George Eliot weaved Paradise Lost references into Middlemarch to draw parallels between protagonist Dorothea Brooke's disillusionment with her older, scholarly husband, who neglects to support her intellectual potential, and Milton's unhappy marriage to a younger woman. The most fascinating entries deal with more recent individuals, detailing how Malcolm X saw Milton's Satan as a stand-in for European Christian colonizers and how Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson's mistaken belief that the poem privileges the spiritual over the political misses its antimonarchical message. The bravura closing chapter ties the individuals' disparate interpretations together by considering them as a fitting realization of Milton's pluralism. This edifying analysis testifies to the enduring power of literature. Photos.
