A Guidebook to Paradise Lost

by Joe Nutt

Paradise Lost has excited and provoked poets and critics for over 300 years. This introduction provides an accessible route into Milton's influential epic poem, guiding students through each of the twelve books by a combination of close textual analysis and summary of key themes and techniques.

Without assuming prior knowledge, Nutt helps navigate the book's biblical and classical background and its relationship to seventeenth-century history. Focusing on developing the reading skills needed to approach this important and complex poem independently, A Guide to Paradise Lost is essential reading for all students of Milton.

288 pages, Paperback

First published August 30, 2011

About the author

Joe Nutt's writing career really began when he published an essay on Anthony Powell as a postgraduate student at The University of Warwick, (after his tutor had graded it B) and then followed that up by winning first prize in the university's short story competition. His academic books are used by some of the leading schools in the UK. He wrote a fortnightly column for the Times Educational Supplement between 2015 and 2019 and has written for The Spectator, Spiked and Areo magazines. His most recent book, 'The Point of Poetry,' was published by Unbound in March 2019. He is writing a new book for John Catt, 'Teaching English for the Real World.'

Reviews

[David Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

[A] bright and committed undergraduate could gain a good deal by being guided by Joe Nutt through Paradise Lost…. In explicating the poem Nutt does much more than simply decode Milton’s classical, Biblical and historical references. His book is an almost three hundred-page exhortation to read carefully and reflectively. The reader is never allowed to think that she can skim lightly for the narrative gist, slowing down only at particularly momentous events or grand flights of diabolical rhetoric. Indeed, the strongest attribute of the book is that Nutt demands, over and over, that the reader pause and think…. Nutt excels at looking at the poem over the reader’s shoulder, so to speak. He recognizes that the big philosophical, political and theological questions Milton explores are inseparable from the nuances of language, metaphor and even syntax. Dr. David K. Anderson (review from The Milton Quarterly), University of Oklahoma.