Clustering and Curling Locks: The Matter of Hair in<i>Paradise Lost</i>

Dobranski, Stephen B.

doi:10.1632/pmla.2010.125.2.337

Cited by 9 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 8 publications

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“…As most of these instances make clear, Milton's hair scorns the taxonomic distinctions between animal and vegetable matter that Enlightenment naturalism would institute. As Stephen Dobranski has suggested, locks like Eve's also manifest "hair's cultural and spiritual value in early modern England," where it still seemed to move, animistically, between all matter and the realm of spirit ( [37], p. 338).…”

Section: Milton's Hairmentioning

confidence: 99%

“A Lock of Thy Bright Hair”: The Enlightenment’s Milton and Our Auratic Material

Lewis

2015

Humanities

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This article looks at how English critics, biographers, and poets once sported with the image, idea, and biomaterial of John Milton's hair. Their play is contextualized within the materialist and instrumental values that were instituted in eighteenth-century literary criticism and biography and that remain central to the humanities today. It was the philologists, antiquarians, bibliophiles, biographers, and anecdotalists of the long eighteenth century who linked the value of cultural objects to their work in the cultural world. The objects sheltered from that world-aesthetic ones in the modern sense-were meanwhile endowed with qualities purloined from an otherwise debunked supernatural register. These contradictory values, all object-centered, cultivated skepticism in observers and thus scripted still-privileged affective postures of mourning and melancholia with respect to objects of inquiry. Dynamic entanglement with Milton's hair in eighteenth-century critical writing tells a different story. It teaches us to approach that writing as writing and to value "Milton's hair" as auratic in the communicative sense later displaced by diffident, object-centered models of the aura. Can we define and engage our "material" along the lines of eighteenth-century "entanglement" with Milton's hair?

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Section: Milton's Hairmentioning

confidence: 99%

“A Lock of Thy Bright Hair”: The Enlightenment’s Milton and Our Auratic Material

Lewis

2015

Humanities

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Sleep, Romance and Human Embodiment

Sullivan

2012

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Garrett Sullivan explores the changing impact of Aristotelian conceptions of vitality and humanness on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature before and after the rise of Descartes. Aristotle's tripartite soul is usually considered in relation to concepts of psychology and physiology. However, Sullivan argues that its significance is much greater, constituting a theory of vitality that simultaneously distinguishes man from, and connects him to, other forms of life. He contends that, in works such as Sidney's Old Arcadia, Shakespeare's Henry IV and Henry V, Spenser's Faerie Queene, Milton's Paradise Lost and Dryden's All for Love, the genres of epic and romance, whose operations are informed by Aristotle's theory, provide the raw materials for exploring different models of humanness; and that sleep is the vehicle for such exploration as it blurs distinctions among man, plant and animal.

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Sullivan¹

2012

Sleep, Romance and Human Embodiment

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Clustering and Curling Locks: The Matter of Hair inParadise Lost

Cited by 9 publications

References 8 publications

“A Lock of Thy Bright Hair”: The Enlightenment’s Milton and Our Auratic Material

“A Lock of Thy Bright Hair”: The Enlightenment’s Milton and Our Auratic Material

Sleep, Romance and Human Embodiment

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