**A FINANCIAL TIMES AND INDEPENDENT BOOK OF THE YEAR**
'A remarkable feat' OBSERVER
'Clever, wide-ranging... witty and sardonic' NEW STATESMAN
A dynamic reappraisal of Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost, exploring its radical origins in the seventeenth century and its revolutionary impact on our culture ever since.
Drawing on his own experiences of teaching literature in prisons, Orlando Reade focuses on twelve unexpected readers of Milton – from Malcolm X to Virginia Woolf, Hannah Arendt to Thomas Jefferson – whose lives and works have shaped our world. He shows the many different, surprising and often contradictory ways in which Milton’s poem has been read across centuries and continents.
Boldly original, lively and far-reaching, What in Me Is Dark is the story of how a work of literature born in the ashes of a failed revolution became an indelible part of the modern imagination. Reade guides us through the epic, exploring how Milton came to write its dark and dazzling poetry, and offering a new account of its radical, ever-evolving legacy.
Publisher: Vintage Publishing
ISBN: 9781787334878
Number of pages: 272
Weight: 463 g
Dimensions: 242 x 162 x 28 mm
A testament to the enduring power of a great work of literature to inspire. - Financial Times, Books of the Year*
[A] thoughtful, wide-ranging and astute book... A remarkable feat of distillation and elucidation… As a response to such a complex and equivocal historical figure [as Milton] neither hagiography nor iconoclasm seems quite adequate, and Reade’s excellent book strikes a difficult and deft balance between the two. - Observer
Clever, wide-ranging... Reade is an academic, but his book is mercifully unlike most academic works. It is witty and sardonic.... [Reade] is sensitive and shockable. - Lucy Hughes-Hallett, New Statesman
Eminently readable... Reade includes a wealth of curious detail - The Telegraph
If we ever needed a lesson about the challenges of freedom it is now. Orlando Reade’s passionate and illuminating account of the afterlives of Paradise Lost is an urgent reminder that freedom - in all senses - is poetry: there to be loved, resisted, re-worked and made to sing again for each new generation. - Lyndsey Stonebridge, author of We Are Free to Change the World
An admirably lucid new book - Independent
Rare and refreshing... gloriously and uniquely about disobedience – both in human and cosmic terms. - The Spectator
Fresh and arresting... What in Me is Dark is a lucid and sometimes moving reminder of how Milton’s epic, for all its pre-modern erudition and doctrinal complexity, has continually been given new life by its modern readers. - Literary Review
Orlando Reade's immensely readable history of the reception of Paradise Lost shows how Milton's great poem vaults across the centuries to meet new readers, its radicalism undimmed. - Adam Smyth, author of The Book-Makers
What in Me is Dark, with its brisk canter over a field as wild and varied as Milton's own masterpiece, will send readers back to the original text with a new sense of its paradoxes, beauties and continuing relevance. - Financial Times
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