Radical Readings Course: Milton’s Women [CANCELLED]

Registration

• Registration will open to Delancey Society members on December 12, to members on December 19, and to the public on December 26.
• Tuition for this reading group is $150.
• Rosenbach members at the Contributor level and above receive a 10% discount on tuition. Please call 215-732-1600 x123 or email [email protected] to register at the discount.
• Not a member? We invite you to join upon registration. Click here for more information about membership.

Radical Readings: Milton’s Women

Milton’s female characters, notably Eve, were famously disparaged by the likes of Charlotte Brontë and Virginia Woolf who read them as second-class creations—shriveled fruits of their author’s misogyny. Indeed, Milton’s reputation is that of the “first of the masculinists.” We know him as the blind old man who forced his daughters to read him Latin; who wrote women to serve men; who used his magisterial erudition to tell sweeping stories about female inferiority, weakness, and betrayal. This course revisits Milton to recover a complex presentation of female agency in Comus, Paradise Lost, and Samson Agonistes. Even as we consider Milton in his own cultural context, we will examine how the Lady, Eve, and Dalila transcend their historical moment to speak eloquently and powerfully to the inequities, prejudices, and oppressions of ours.

Syllabus

April 15: The Lady speaks
A Masque or Comus

April 22: A Woman in Paradise
Paradise Lost, Book IV, Book IX, Book X

April 29: Her Warbling Charms
Samson Agonistes

About the Instructor

Vanita Neelakanta is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Rider University. Her principal research area is seventeenth-century English literature and culture, with a special emphasis on Milton, Renaissance and Restoration drama, early modern religious poetry, and Reformation theology. She has just completed a monograph on early modern representations of the Roman siege of Jerusalem, forthcoming with University of Delaware Press. She teaches courses on seventeenth-century English literature; contemporary adaptations of biblical and classical texts; the Bible as literature and philosophy; existentialism; Shakespeare; as well as courses on science fiction and classic Hollywood cinema for the American Studies program at Rider.