My Substitutes I send ye": Allegory and the Matter of Representation in "Paradise Lost."
- Author/Editor
- Gilders, Adam Penn.
- Title
- My Substitutes I send ye": Allegory and the Matter of Representation in "Paradise Lost."
- Published
- Gilders, Adam Penn. "My Substitutes I send ye": Allegory and the Matter of Representation in "Paradise Lost." Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Toronto, 2002. vii, 314 pp. Dissertation Abstracts International A63.12. Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.
- Review
- "This thesis explores the allegory of Sin and Death in 'Paradise Lost' as an expression of Milton's ambivalence towards poetic representation, indeed, towards the figural as such. I argue that Sin and Death's representation of their concepts, to wit, sin and death, is mediated by their mimesis of representation. Satan's infernal progeny arrive at their concepts indirectly, substituting their own genealogy as figures for the actual genealogy--the genealogy of evil--which they figure. Milton's fable of evil, in other words, doubles as a fable of the fictions which mediate its production and interpretation . . . . My first chapter locates Milton's allegory within a literary and critical spectrum that ranges from the 'poetics' of Plato to the eighteenth century reception of 'Paradise Lost.' I examine the allegory of 'Pecché' and 'Mort' in John Gower's fourteenth century poem the 'Mirour de l'omme' [pp. 42-59] and the allegorical poetics of Spenser's 'The Faerie Queene. My second and third chapters address the division in Milton's allegory—posited, most famously, by Samuel Johnson—of the material and the spiritual. In my final chapter I investigate an exchange between the poetics and the politics of representation. Satan's deployment of Sin and Death in Book Ten as “Substitutes” (10.402), I argue, points to a figural impasse at the heart of Early Modern discourses of political representation. My treatment of this problem focuses on George Wither's 1645 poem 'Vox Pacifica' and on Milton's 'Eikonoklastes'" (ii-iv).
- Date
- 2002
- Gower Subjects
- Influence and Later Allusion
Mirour de l'Omme