Paper Topics

English 513

Dr. Fike

During the fall of 2009, my students pursued the following term paper topics:

Charles I and Satan
Prolepsis in PL
The sacred feminine
Eve's mirror stage and Frankenstein's monster
Eve's intellectual adultery
Adam as the cause of the Fall
Eve and flowers
God's smiling
Venus
Chaismus in PL
The Gunpowder Plot

Comments in Blessington's book suggest numerous areas that you could focus down into paper topics:

Page 8: "A system of verbal allusions and genre patterning make Paradise Lost assume and revise not only all previous epics, but also tragedy, divine comedy, georgic, love elegy, hymn, pastoral, prophecy, dialogue, scientific treatise, and many more genres."
Page 9: "There are discussions of concepts: music, poetry, political liberty, the nature of God, the nature of nature, free will, sex, domestic happiness and domestic hell, human history and divine love, the nature of power and the pretexts of rebellion, the interpretation of dreams, the tragedy and naturalness of death, and the longing for immortality, to name a few."
Page 11: "But Milton found no lack of imitators in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who freely interpreted and freely imitated what they found in their Milton: Dryden, Pope, Blake, Wordsworth, Byron , Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, to name only the most important."
Page 15: "the rival kingdom of Hell parallels Virgil's rival kingdom of Carthage;"
Page 20: "source study, style, rhetoric, Satan, and Milton's God. Every theory has been brought to bear: Freudian, reader-response, deconstruction, archetypal, generic tension within the poem (e.g., epic versus drama), the visual arts, music, science, politics, theology, typology."
Page 25: "art, music, science, philosophy, and theology"; for music, cf. Lewalski 201.
Page 36, re. Satan: "His many disguises--cherub, cormorant, tiger, serpent, mist--reveal his chameleon nature," not to mention other things. See C.S. Lewis's comment at the bottom of page 99 in A Preface to Paradise Lost: "From here to general," etc.
Pages 38 and 60: Eve's dream.
Page 39: Primitive Christianity.
Page 54: "If Raphael saves Sarah and Tobias from the evil spirit Asmodeus, he has far less success with Adam and Eve."
Page 55: Satan and Comus.
Page 60: "astronomy, gardening, ethics, animal behavior, music, and the one prohibition"; "the dangers of lust."
Page 61: Milton and Galileo (cf. Lewalski 111).
Pages 65-66: Eden and gardens in literature, esp. Spenser's FQ, II.xii: Bower of Blisse vs. "blissful bower" (4.691).
Page 89: Michael's prophecy.
Page 91: Classical heroism.
Page 100: The Book of Job as a model for Paradise Lost.
Page 122: Source study.

Comments in Lewalski's biography of Milton also suggest suitable points of entry:

Milton and the sonnet.
Chastity.
Page 66: "moral evil, avarice, gluttony, suicide, the knowledge of literature, curiosity, music, sloth, lying."
Page 76: The Circe myth.
Page 106: "aristocratic republic, the form of government he came to regard as best suited to promote human dignity and freedom."
Pages 111 and 519: Catholicism and the architecture in hell.
Milton's marriage to Mary Powell and his position on divorce.
Page 194: Milton's famous gaffe regarding Guyon and the Palmer (the Palmer is not with Guyon in Mammon's cave).
Page 237 and 270: Idolatry.
Page 285: Milton and Roger Williams and toleration.
Page 420: Predestination.
Page 442: "life, love, artistic creativity, theology, work, history, and politics."
Page 466: Hell in connection with "monarchy, tyranny, idolatry, rebellion, liberty, republicanism."
Page 468: The war in heaven.
Page 469: Satan and Charles I.
Page 470: The Nimrod episode.
Page 471: "the site of a future colony, the Paradise of Fools, to be peopled chiefly by Catholics."
Page 473: Abdiel.
Page 482: The creation of Adam and Eve in connection with Milton's beliefs about male and female psychology.
Page 483: "a classic Lacanian mirror scene."
Page 484: Raphael and Neoplatonism.
Page 485: Eve and Areopagitica.
Page 487: Milton and martyrdom.
Page 516: Banquet and Stuart courts.
Page 517: Satan and monarchy.
Page 539: Blake's illustrations (see R.M. Frye's book on visual art and PL).
Page 541: "Both Milton and Pope influenced the first African-American poet, the educated eighteenth-century slave woman Phillis Wheatley."
Page 543: Milton and Frankenstein.

Patrides:

Page 48: Milton's angels and Burton's Anatomy.
Page 130: Jacob's ladder.