What in Me Is Dark: The Revolutionary Afterlife of Paradise Lost [Hardcover]

A highly original hybrid of literary criticism and political history, telling of the enduring, surprising and ever-evolving relevance of Milton’s epic poem through the scandalous life of its creator and the revolutionary lives that were influenced by it.

What in Me Is Dark tells the unlikely story of how Milton’s epic poem came to haunt political struggles over the past four centuries, including the many different, unexpected, often contradictory ways in which it has been read, interpreted, and appropriated through time and across the world, and to revolutionary ends. The book focuses on twelve readers—including Malcolm X, Thomas Jefferson, George Eliot, Hannah Arendt, and C.L.R James—whose lives demonstrate extraordinary and disturbing influence on the modern age.

Drawing from his own experiences teaching Paradise Lost in New Jersey prisons, English scholar Orlando Reade deftly investigates how the poem was read by people embedded in struggles against tyranny, slavery, colonialism, gender inequality, and capitalist exploitation. It is experimental nonfiction at its finest; rich literary analysis and social, cultural and political history are woven together to make a clarifying case for the undeniable impact of the poem. Enlightening and enthusiastic.
—Ed Simon, The New York Times Book Review

It's unusual, and instructive, to encounter a work of criticism so at ease with the idea that its cherished object might, at best, be useful to its readers—answerable to their needs and their purposes.
—Catherine Nicholson, New York Review of Books

The most perceptive passages in Mr. Reade’s book place thinkers in lively debate over the central meanings of Milton&rsquol#&