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.
Author(s): Reginald A. Wilburn
Series: Medieval & Renaissance Literary Studies
Publisher: Duquesne University Press
Year: 2014
Language: English
Pages: 406
City: Pittsburgh
Acknowledgments ix
Chapter 1. Making “Darkness Visible”: Milton and Early African American Literature 1
Chapter 2. Phillis Wheatley’s Miltonic Journeys in Poems on Various Subjects 57
Chapter 3. Black Audio-Visionaries and the Rise of Miltonic Influence in Colonial America and the Early Republic 95
Chapter 4. Of Might and Men: Milton, Frederick Douglass, and Resistant Masculinity as Existential Geography 149
Chapter 5. Breaking New Grounds with Milton in Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Moses: 'A Story of the Nile' 189
Chapter 6. Miltonic Soundscapes in Anna Julia Cooper’s 'A Voice from the South' 229
Chapter 7. Returning to Milton’s Hell with Weapons of Perfect Passivity in Sutton E. Griggs’s 'Imperium in Imperio' 279
Epilogue. Malcolm X, 'Paradise Lost', and the Twentieth Century Infernal Reader 327
Notes 335
Bibliography 361
Index 379
