Paradise Lost

Description

A revision of the Prentice Hall edition of 1962. David Scott Kastan preserves the quality and character of Hughes's richly annotated edition in this masterful revision, which includes a thorough updating of the text, notes, and bibliographies to reflect the scholarship of the last half-century. Kastan's new introductory essay engages the pressing questions the poem raises for contemporary readers, focusing on the literary, religious, and political dimensions of Paradise Lost that have made its reading a demanding yet always exhilarating experience.

John Alvis is Professor of English at the University of Dallas and the Institute for Philosophic Studies.

[A]n exemplary job both of presenting the major topics of Paradise Lost and of entering the selva oscura of Milton criticism. . . . Students and scholars alike will appreciate the balanced approach to the complexities, difficulties, and conundrums of Milton's poem and the criticism on it. Kastan's prose is not just lively but chiseled, and it is destined to affect students. --Patrick Cheney, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 Kastan is an exemplary editor, attuned to emerging critical currents, yet steeped in the scholarship of an earlier tradition, aware of the text's provenance and reception, alert to its topicality. His introduction, a model of theoretically informed, politically committed, historically grounded criticism, makes this edition of Paradise Lost all you would expect from one of the most erudite and perceptive figures in the field. --Willy Maley, Modern Language Review This is a superb edition, a model of careful editing and judicious annotation. --Leslie Brisman, Department of English, Yale University