Milton's Uncertain Eden: Understanding Place in Paradise LostThis study describes a variety of ways of thinking about place in the Renaissance and in Paradise Lost. Despite coming from different perspectives, they have in common the idea that the difficulty of the relationship of reciprocity that poetic subjects often expect from their environment destabilizes those subjects' understanding, not only of environment, but of themselves. The study explores destabilization as it affects aspects of the poem from Adam's sense of the landscape of Eden and the meaning of the Fall itself, to the relationship the ambiguous landscapes of Paradise Lost create between Adam and Eve, the poet and the reader; all of whom are struggling to make sense of the same problematically described places. To a surprisingly large extent, the description of prelapsarian Eden and the events that go on within it have in common a failed attempt to understand the nature of the surroundings. In observing the centrality and difficultly of this poetic discourse of place, the problem of place is found at the very heart of the Fall. |
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... kind of thinking that is entirely unlike Corydon's . The allusion is not a thematic imitation but a descriptive innovation . The relationship between lovelorn shepherd and pastoral landscape , however , is not the same in all of ...
... kind of mind Marvell discusses is the kind that can handle the contradiction Empson points out . This inclusive mind , I think , is the kind of mind that is presented as the ideal in " Glowworms , " but that in that poem cannot be ...
... kind outside of Proust ) and non - narrative . What distinguishes nar- rative description is that the time of the narration has a direct relationship to a kind of time inherent in the description itself . The effect of descriptiveness ...