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Can you help me develop a critical appreciation of Milton's Paradise Lost from the perspective of New Historicism?

New Historicism, a term most associated with Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt, puts literary texts and history in dialogue with one another, both by placing literary texts into their specific historical (and, being cross-disciplinary, economic, sociological, philosophical, etc.) context(s) and by erasing boundaries between "historical" texts and "literary" texts. In other words, New Historians ask not only what we can learn about a literary text by embedding it as fully as possible in its historical moment, but what we can glean about a historical moment from a literary text.


More than one critic has applied a New Historical lens to Paradise Lost. For example, in Milton's Imperial Epic: Paradise Lost and the Discourse of Colonialism, Martin Evans interpreted Paradise Lost as a commentary on colonialism, in full swing at that time, arguing that England represented Paradise and the new colonies in America both "hell-America" (the place occupied by those "undesirables" being sent from England to America) and "Eden-America" (the place of the pure natives) with Satan as a conquistador aiming to expand into "Eden-America." Evans did this through a careful examination of the language in many documents produced about colonialism at that time. By comparing the language used in documents pertaining to the New World to the language in Paradise Lost, Evans showed that just as England was "purging" itself of undesirables ("devils") by sending them to the New World (hell-America), so Milton had God purging heaven of its devils by sending them to hell. Evans also likened Adam and Eve to naked Indians in Eden-America, with Satan depicted as the colonist from hell-America bent on seducing and tricking the natives. The larger point here is that Milton's epic was influenced by the writing and thinking about colonialism that was going on at the time in England and that this provided a particular conceptual and discursive framework for Milton to imagine what Paradise, Adam and Eve, and Satan were like.


In her New Literary Histories: New Historicism and Contemporary Criticism, Claire Colebrook interprets Milton's Satan as reflecting questions raised in the seventeenth century (the period of the English Civil War) about monarchial power. While Milton was undeniably an orthodox Christian who meant us to understand Satan as evil and God as good, Colebrook argues that some of the contemporary "revolutionary" questionings of monarchial power seeped inevitably into Milton's text and led to perceptions of God as a tyrant and Satan as having justifications for rebelling.


From a New Historical perspective, it is not surprising at all that Milton's epic would borrow, even if unconsciously, from some of the contemporary language and thinking about colonialism and monarchy and then, in turn, influence other people's thinking about these subjects.

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