Milton, Evil and Literary History

This title uses reading of Milton, in particular "Paradise Lost", to raise wider questions about current theories of literary history. Using the work of John Milton and his conflict between good and evil, Claire Colebrook shows exactly how we read literary history according to quite specific images of growth, development, progression, flourishing and succession. Colebrook illustrates not only how goodness is aligned with images of a life of expansion, creation, production and fruition, while evil is associated with the inert, non-relational, static and stagnant, but how these associations have also underpinned a distinction between good and evil notions of capitalism. Informed by an expansive corpus of philosophical texts, including Kant, Aristotle, Deleuze and Derrida, Colebrook's study presents a new, surprising, theory of literary history and makes a significant contribution to Milton studies.