The King James Bible across Borders and Centuries - Hardcover

9780820704777: The King James Bible across Borders and Centuries

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0820704776 ISBN 13: 9780820704777

Publisher: Duquesne University Press, 2014

As this latest venture demonstrates, the history of Milton on film has been full of ambitious visions and dazzling failures. From the earliest proto-cinematic inventions, Milton has represented the quintessential subject for increasingly spectacular visual entertainment: mechanical pantomimes and spectacles in the eighteenth century; panoramas, dioramas, musical extravaganzas, and magic lantern shows in the nineteenth century. Milton has also figured centrally in the development of the cinema over the past century, from the silent era and its turn to a technological sublime to the contemporary age of sprawling digital cinematography and Hollywood blockbusters. Milton on Film examines the two competing narratives that have tended to describe Milton's relationship to the cinema since its beginnings. In the first, Milton's imagination defines the very limits of cinematic representation, as the extraordinary ineffability of a work like Paradise Lost could only be realized in a filmic medium. In the second, though, there is something too serious or obscure in Milton's epic to translate into any popular medium, especially film. Interestingly, the volume also includes the earliest image of Paradise Lost on film, and nearly 150 other films are considered in a Miltonic context. Examples range from the mainstream to the marginal, literary period pieces to schlock horror, westerns, space odysseys, and film noir. As Brown asserts, Paradise Lost may well be the greatest film never made, but Milton continues to shape and define the contours of the cinema in unexpected and, occasionally, quite glorious ways.

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Review:

"The topics are wide-ranging and should appeal to a variety of interests, running the gamut from linguistic to cultural studies, with chapters categorized under the headings 'Transforming, ' 'Extending, ' and 'Appropriating.' As the volume makes clear, the protean nature of the King James Version promises to make it a worthy subject of research, perhaps even for another 400 years."-- "Sixteenth Century Journal" (1/1/2015 12:00:00 AM)

About the Author:

ANGELICA DURAN is professor of English, comparative literature, and religious studies at Purdue University. She served as Director of Religious Studies at Purdue from 2009 to 2013. She is the author of The Age of Milton and the Scientific Revolution as well as more than 20 scholarly articles and book chapters, editor of A Concise Companion to Milton, and coeditor of Mo Yan in Context: Nobel Laureate and Global Storyteller.

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