Bodies & Belonging in Milton's Epic Tradition

Epic poetry is like a blockbuster film (with war, sex, downfall, exaltation) and was considered "the best and most accomplished kind of poetry" in the Renaissance. Four-hundred years later, its greatest practitioners are rarely read. Our course aims to compensate for this neglect by immersing students in the greatest eddies of epic activity from two interrelated vantage points. First, Milton's Paradise Lost, that culmination of the entire (neo)classical epic tradition. And second, disability studies, which interrogates how certain physical and mental features (often coded as deviations from the able-bodied norm) become stigmatized.