TY  - BOOK
AU  - Silver,Victoria
TI  - Imperfect Sense: The Predicament of Milton's Irony 
SN  - 9781400824113
AV  - PR3562 .S54 2001eb
U1  - 821/.4 21
PY  - 2021///]
CY  - Princeton, NJ : 
PB  - Princeton University Press, 
KW  - God in literature
KW  - Irony in literature
KW  - Theology in literature
KW  - Theology, Doctrinal
KW  - England
KW  - History
KW  - 17th century
KW  - LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh
KW  - bisacsh
KW  - Adiaphorism
KW  - Allegory
KW  - Antinomianism
KW  - Arminianism
KW  - Barfield, Owen
KW  - Barker, Arthur
KW  - Burkert, Walter
KW  - Calvinism
KW  - Cavell, Stanley
KW  - Curran, Stuart
KW  - Decorum
KW  - Delphic dicta
KW  - Dryden, John
KW  - Empson, William
KW  - Exodus
KW  - Fallon, Robert
KW  - Ferry, Anne
KW  - Fish, Stanley
KW  - Fletcher, Angus
KW  - Genesis
KW  - Gospels
KW  - Grose, Christopher
KW  - Guillory, John
KW  - Hallyn, Fernand
KW  - Homer
KW  - Irony
KW  - Isaiah
KW  - Jeremiah
KW  - Kahn, Victoria
KW  - Kelley, Maurice
KW  - Lactantius
KW  - Leib, Michael
KW  - Loewenstein, David
KW  - MacIntyre, Alisdair
KW  - Malleus Maleficarum
KW  - McGrath, Alister
KW  - Monism
KW  - Montaigne, Michel
KW  - Muller, Richard
KW  - Mysterium tremendum
KW  - Niebuhr, Reinhold
KW  - Nostra theologica
KW  - Nussbaum, Martha
KW  - Otto, Rudoph
KW  - Parable
KW  - Patristics
KW  - Patterson, Annabel
KW  - Philosophical theism
KW  - Presbyterianism
KW  - Putnam, Hillary
KW  - Quilligan, Maureen
KW  - Sacraments
KW  - Scepticism
KW  - Scripture
N1  - Frontmatter --; CONTENTS --; PREFACE --; LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS --; ONE. Introduction --; TWO. Milton's God --; THREE. Milton's Text --; FOUR. Milton's Speaker --; FIVE. Milton's Devil --; SIX. Milton's Eden --; NOTES --; INDEX; restricted access
N2  - Why do we hate Milton's God? Victoria Silver reengages with a perennial problem in Milton studies, one whose genealogy dates back at least to the Romantics, but which finds its most cogent modern expression in William Empson's revulsion at Milton's God and Stanley Fish's defense. Thoroughly reexamining Milton's theology and its sources in Luther and Calvin, as well as theoretical parallels in the works of Wittgenstein, Cavell, Adorno, and Benjamin, Silver contends that this repugnance is not extrinsic but deliberately cultivated in the theodicy of Paradise Lost. From the vantage of a world riven by injustice, deity can appear to contradict its own revelation, with the result that we experience a God divided against himself. For as Job found in his sufferings, that God appears more ruse than redeemer. Milton's irony recreates this religious predicament in Paradise Lost to the intractable perplexity of his readers, who have in their turn fashioned an equally dissociated Milton--at once unconscious and calculating, heterodox and doctrinaire, heroic and intolerable. Silver argues that, ultimately, these contrary Gods and antithetical Miltons arise from the sense we want to give the speaker's justification, which rather than ratifying our assumptions of meaning and the incoherence they foster, seeks fundamentally to reform them and thus to justify God's ways
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400824113?locatt=mode:legacy
UR  - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9781400824113
UR  - https://www.degruyter.com/cover/covers/9781400824113.jpg
ER  -