Preaching the Gospel of Black Revolt : : Appropriating Milton in Early African American Literature / / Reginald A. Wilburn.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Penn State University Press Complete eBook-Package 2014-2015
• VerfasserIn: Wilburn, Reginald A.,
• Place / Publishing House: University Park, PA : : Penn State University Press, , [2014]; ©2014
• Year of Publication: 2014
• Language: English
• Series: Medieval & Renaissance Literary Studies
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (406 p.)

In this comparative and hybrid study, Reginald A. Wilburn offers the first scholarly work to theorize African American authors’ rebellious appropriations of Milton and his canon. Wilburn engages African Americans’ transatlantic negotiations with perhaps the preeminent freedom writer in the English tradition.Preaching the Gospel of Black Revolt contends that early African American authors appropriated and remastered Milton by completing and complicating England’s epic poet of liberty with the intertextual originality of repetitive difference. Wilburn focuses on a diverse array of early African American authors, such as Phillis Wheatley, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Frederick Douglass, and Anna Julia Cooper. He examines the presence of Milton in their works as a reflection of early African Americans’ rhetorical affiliations with the poet’s satanic epic for messianic purposes of freedom and racial uplift.Wilburn explains that early African American authors were attracted to Milton because of his preeminent status in literary tradition, strong Christian convictions, and poetic mastery of the English language. This tripartite ministry makes Milton an especially indispensible intertext for authors whose writings and oratory were sometimes presumed beneath the dignity of criticism. Through close readings of canonical and obscure texts, Wilburn explores how various authors rebelled against such assessments of black intellect by altering Milton’s meanings, themes, and figures beyond orthodox interpretations and imbuing them with hermeneutic shades of interpretive and cultural difference. However they remastered Milton, these artists respected his oeuvre as a sacred yet secular talking book of revolt, freedom, and cultural liberation.Preaching the Gospel of Black Revolt particularly draws upon recent satanic criticism in Milton studies, placing it in dialogue with methodologies germane to African American literary studies. By exposing the subversive workings of an intertextual Middle Passage in black literacy, Wilburn invites scholars from diverse areas of specialization to traverse within and beyond the cultural veils of racial interpretation and along the color line in literary studies.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Chapter 1. Making “Darkness Visible” -- Chapter 2. Phillis Wheatley’s Miltonic Journeys in Poems on Various Subjects -- Chapter 3. Black Audio-Visionaries and the Rise of Miltonic Influence in Colonial America and the Early Republic -- Chapter 4. Of Might and Men -- Chapter 5. Breaking New Grounds with Milton in Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Moses: A Story of the Nile -- Chapter 6. Miltonic Soundscapes in Anna Julia Cooper’s A Voice from the South -- Chapter 7. Returning to Milton’s Hell with Weapons of Perfect Passivity in Sutton E. Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio -- Epilogue -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index