Milton

A deep-dive seminar that treats John Milton not as a fixed monument of English literature but as a writer whose poetry and prose are inseparable from the religious upheavals and political experiments of mid-seventeenth-century Britain. You spend most of the term working slowly through Paradise Lost alongside shorter poems, the divorce tracts, and Areopagitica, pairing them with critics like Fish, Kahn, and Teskey, and proving your reading in two midterms, a paper, and sustained discussion. It sits at the upper end of the early-modern track, building on your Renaissance and Shakespeare courses and asking you to argue, finally, where Milton actually belongs in literary history.