Thomas N. Corns – författare

The diverse and controversial world of contemporary Milton studies is brought alive in this stimulating Companion.

First published in 1987, The Literature of Controversy is a collection of essays by scholars from Britain, the United States, and Australia on major works from a classic epoch of English controversial prose. Each essay engages a single text or series of texts, less to discuss the ideas and arguments per se than to consider the rhetorical techniques assumed for the political manipulation of the readers. Though emphasis varies from contribution to contribution, the purpose, broadly, is to explore how the constituents of those texts are organised to coax, cajole, persuade or inspire those to whom they address. As the editor argues in his introduction, this approach, the critique of polemical strategy, for the most part accepts the validity of paying regard to the author and his intentions; it engages questions about the responses of the readership at which the texts were targeted; and it proceeds intertextuality in its attempts to reconstruct the controversies in which the texts were embedded and the codes within which they operated. This book will be of interest to students of literature, rhetoric and history.

First published in 1987, The Literature of Controversy is a collection of essays by scholars from Britain, the United States, and Australia on major works from a classic epoch of English controversial prose. Each essay engages a single text or series of texts, less to discuss the ideas and arguments per se than to consider the rhetorical techniques assumed for the political manipulation of the readers. Though emphasis varies from contribution to contribution, the purpose, broadly, is to explore how the constituents of those texts are organised to coax, cajole, persuade or inspire those to whom they address. As the editor argues in his introduction, this approach, the critique of polemical strategy, for the most part accepts the validity of paying regard to the author and his intentions; it engages questions about the responses of the readership at which the texts were targeted; and it proceeds intertextuality in its attempts to reconstruct the controversies in which the texts were embedded and the codes within which they operated. This book will be of interest to students of literature, rhetoric and history.

A New Companion to Milton builds on the critically-acclaimed original, bringing alive the diverse and controversial world of contemporary Milton studies while reflecting the very latest advances in research in the field.

A New Companion to Milton builds on the critically-acclaimed original, bringing alive the diverse and controversial world of contemporary Milton studies while reflecting the very latest advances in research in the field.

Thomas Corns is a major international authority on Milton, the Caroline Court, and the political literature of the English Civil War and the Interregnum.

First published in 1991, this book collects a broad array of path-finding scholarship by specialists in Coleridge and Romantic literature on the subject of his prose. They range from broad appraisals of Coleridge’s own critical practises; demonstrations of the fecundity of his autobiography, the Biographia Literaria, for contemporaries; the effect of Milton and the radical polemicists of the English Civil War on Coleridge’s early political and religious dissent; and the influence of the Hebrew prophetic tradition in his move away from the conjectural millenarianism of his youth towards the interpretation of Prophecy and a symbolic narrative.