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Publications and Works-In-Progress

  1. The Atheist Milton (Ashgate, forthcoming)
    This project argues that Milton was an atheist in his own day, and would be an atheist were he alive today, Despite the deliberate provocation of the title,  I am trying to make a fairly nuanced case. “Atheism” meant different things in Milton’s day than it does for us today. Essentially, the word has become narrower in scope for us, less flexible in its capacity to carry shades of meaning. “Atheist” tends to mean one thing today: someone who does not believe in God. In Milton’s time, the term “atheist” was used in a much more wide-ranging way: it could refer to someone who did not believe that God existed, but more commonly it referred, not to unbelief, but to variations in belief that were regarded by the accuser (and the word is almost always an accusation rather than a self-chosen label) as straying from orthodox belief, what I refer to in the book (with all due irony) as correct belief as opposed to the incorrect belief of the “atheist.”

    My argument is two-fold: based on his association with Arian ideas (denial of the doctrine of the Trinity), his argument for the de Deo theory of creation (which puts him in line with the materialism of Spinoza and Hobbes), and his Mortalist argument that the human soul dies with the human body, that Milton was an Atheist by the commonly-used definitions of the period. And as the poet who takes a reader from the presence of an imperious, monarchical God in Paradise Lost, to the internal—almost Gnostic—conception of God in Paradise Regained, to the absence of any God whatsoever in Samson Agonistes, Milton is the poet of the atheists, pushing harder against that old “task-Master” than any poet before or since.
     
  2. "The Gnostic Milton: Salvation and Divine Similitude in Paradise Regained"
    Forthcoming in The New MIlton Criticism. Eds. Peter C. Herman and Elizabeth Sauer, Cambridge UP.
     
  3. “Teaching Milton’s God”
    Forthcoming in Approaches to Teaching Paradise Lost. 2nd ed. Ed. Peter C. Herman. MLA Press.
     
  4. “From Last Things to First: The Apophatic Vision of Paradise Regained”
    In Milton and the Visionary Mode: Essays on Prophecy and Violence. Eds. Peter E. Medine and David V. Urban. Duquesne UP. pp. 241-265.
     
  5. "The Mysterious Darkness of Unknowing: Paradise Lost and the God Beyond Names." A book chapter for a collection on the 1667 edition of Paradise Lost edited by John Shawcross and Michael Lieb (forthcoming from Duquesne UP).
     
  6. "The Negation of “God”: Samson Agonistes and Negative Theology--a  chapter-length paper currently being prepared for a long form presentation in Chicago at the Newberry Library Milton Seminar in May 2005, and a shorter form presentation at the International Milton Conference in Grenoble, France in June 2005.
     
  7. The Tyranny of Heaven: Milton’s Rejection of God as King U. Delaware Press. Read a sample of this book, or buy an e-book edition here.


     

  8. “'His Tyranny Who Reigns': The Biblical Roots of Divine Kingship and Milton's Rejection of Heav'n's King”
         Milton Studies 43, pp. 111-144, (2004)
     
  9. “Dismemberment and Community: Sacrifice and the Communal Body in the Hebrew Scriptures”
    Religion and Literature     35.1 (Spring 2003), pp. 1-21
     
  10. “'That be far from thee': Divine Evil and Milton's Attempt to 'Justify the ways of God to men'”
    Milton Quarterly, May 2002, vol. 36, no. 2, pp. 87-105
     
  11. “Thomas Shadwell”
    The Age of Milton: An Encyclopedia of Major 17th-Century British and American Authors. Ed. Alan Hager. Greenwood Press, 2004
     
  12. Review of Victoria Silver, Imperfect Sense: The Predicament of Milton's Irony and David Loewenstein, Representing Revolution in Milton and his Contemporaries
     Religion and Literature     37.3 (Autumn 2005) 127-36.
     
  13. “The Horror is Us: Western Religious Memory and the Colonialist God in Heart of Darkness”
    Henry Street (9.1), Spring 2000, pp. 20-39

Other Resources

  1. Literary Criticism From the Dead--a series of analyses/summaries of critical positions from Plato to Postmodernism
  2. The Quest for the Fiction of an Absolute--an essay (in need of some reworking before attempting journal publication) on mysticism in two poems by Wallace Stevens.
  3. Turn, Turn, and Turn Again--a brief essay on "honesty" and "whoredom" in Othello.
  4. Alchemy, Witchcraft, and the Magus Figure in The Tempest--notes for a class discussion/lecture.
  5. Reclaiming the Self: Transcending the Fragmentation of the Individual Subject--an only slightly altered version of my MA thesis (from 1996), parts of which I may (or may not) return to in order to develop more fully.