An Early Eighteenth-Century Rhymed Paraphrase of Paradise Lost, II, 1-225

1941 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 133
Author(s):  
M. Maurice Shudofsky
2019 ◽  
pp. 335-373
Author(s):  
Colin Burrow

This chapter shows how arguments about intellectual property in the eighteenth century changed attitudes towards imitatio, and explores the emergence of romantic poetics from earlier arguments about imitation. It begins by considering Alexander Pope’s Dunciad and its distinction between ‘parodies’ of vernacular authors on the one hand and ‘imitations’ of classical texts on the other. It then shows how John Locke’s theories of property and early eighteenth-century legislation about copyright complicated that distinction between classical and vernacular texts. Through an analysis of William Lauder’s accusations that Milton was a plagiarist it demonstrates both how the reception of Paradise Lost became central to arguments about intellectual property in the period, and also how the Lauder affair led to changes in the ways theorists wrote about imitatio. Milton came to be regarded as both a common good which could be imitated freely, and as the most authoritative example of proprietorial vernacular author. That influenced how he was in turn imitated by later vernacular writers. William Wordsworth in particular frequently associated Milton with landscapes and areas such as public rights of way, which were simultaneously common goods and private property. Wordsworth consequently transformed the ancient metaphor of the imitator following in the footsteps of an earlier author into a representation of the poet ranging freely over a land which is partly a common good, and partly what is still called a literary ‘estate’.


2021 ◽  
Vol 90 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-57
Author(s):  
Ayelet Langer

This essay proposes that in Paradise Lost Milton represents the conscious self as constructed over time, thereby anticipating the early eighteenth- century formulation of identity as a problem of diachronic identity. Milton represents this process of self-constitution by situating the mind’s act of unifying itself in the present moment, which he models on Aristotle’s definition of the now as both a connection and a boundary of time. Aristotle’s bivalency of the now serves in Paradise Lost to distinguish between the capacity of prelapsarian and postlapsarian individuals to constitute their self by organizing their experiences in time. As a connection of time, the Aristotelian now grounds Milton’s representation of the way in which the prelapsarian individual constitutes his or her own self. As a boundary of time, it marks the failure of the postlapsarian mind to achieve such constitution, which leads to a disintegration of the self. Thus, Aristotle’s distinction between the two contrasting aspects of the now becomes, in Milton’s representation of the self, the prism through which Milton forms a clear distinction between two fundamental structures of identity, fallen and unfallen.


Author(s):  
Daniel R. Melamed

If there is a fundamental musical subject of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Mass in B Minor, a compositional problem the work explores, it is the tension between two styles cultivated in church music of Bach’s time. One style was modern and drew on up-to-date music such as the instrumental concerto and the opera aria. The other was old-fashioned and fundamentally vocal, borrowing and adapting the style of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, his sixteenth-century contemporaries, and his seventeenth-century imitators. The movements that make up Bach’s Mass can be read as exploring the entire spectrum of possibilities offered by these two styles (the modern and the antique), ranging from movements purely in one or the other to a dazzling variety of ways of combining the two. The work illustrates a fundamental opposition in early-eighteenth-century sacred music that Bach confronts and explores in the Mass.


Author(s):  
Huaping Lu-Adler

This chapter discusses certain exegetical challenges posed by Kant’s logic corpus, which comprises the Logic compiled by Jäsche, Kant’s notes on logic, transcripts of his logic lectures, and remarks about logic in his own publications. It argues for a “history of philosophical problems” method by which to reconstruct a Kantian theory of logic that is maximally coherent, philosophically interesting, and historically significant. To ensure a principled application of this method, the chapter considers Kant’s conception of history against the background of the controversy between eclecticism and systematic philosophy that shaped the German philosophical discourse during the early eighteenth century. It thereby looks for an angle to make educated decisions about how to select materials from each of the periods considered in the book and builds a historical narrative that can best inform our understanding of Kant’s theory of logic.


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