Milton's Visual Imagination Imagery in Paradise Lost [Hardcover]

Milton's Visual Imagination contends that Milton enriches his biblical source text with acute and sometimes astonishing visual details.Critics have traditionally thought of John Milton as an author who wrote for the ear more than the eye. In Milton's Visual Imagination and Paradise Lost, Stephen B. Dobranski proposes that, on the contrary, Milton enriches his biblical source text with acute and sometimes astonishing visual details.Critics have traditionally thought of John Milton as an author who wrote for the ear more than the eye. In Milton's Visual Imagination and Paradise Lost, Stephen B. Dobranski proposes that, on the contrary, Milton enriches his biblical source text with acute and sometimes astonishing visual details.Critics have traditionally found fault with the descriptions and images in John Milton's poetry and thought of him as an author who wrote for the ear more than the eye. In Milton's Visual Imagination and Paradise Lost, Stephen B. Dobranski proposes that, on the contrary, Milton enriches his biblical source text with acute and sometimes astonishing visual details. He contends that Milton's imagery  traditionally disparaged by critics  advances the epic's narrative while expressing the author's heterodox beliefs. In particular, Milton exploits the meaning of objects and gestures to overcome the inherent difficulty of his subject and to accommodate seventeenth-century readers. Bringing together Milton's material philosophy with an analysis of both his poetic tradition and cultural circumstances, this book is a major contribution to our understanding of early modern visual culture as well as of Milton's epic.1. Introduction: of things invisible; 2. Free will and God's scales; 3. Heaven's gates; 4. Pondering Satan's shield; 5. What do bad angels look like?; 6. Transported touch; 7. Clustering and curling locks; 8. Images of the future and the son.'Dobranski finds Milton to have drawn much more on the material, visible, workaday world around him, fol¼