Popular Culture Review Vol. 18, No. 2, Summer 2007 | Page 119

BOOK REVIEWS 115 Chifia Clipper is nicely organized into logical chapter headings and contains scores of helpful pictorial illustrations. This book will surely have broad appeal: for historians and popular culture enthusiasts, for those captured by the intriguing fascination that nostalgia holds, for anyone looking for an entertaining and satisfying read. Lee Partain, Clark College Milton in Popular Culture Edited by Laura Lunger Knoppers and Gregory M. Colon Semenza Palgrave Macmillan, 2006 From the postmodern films of Woody Allen to the infinite reaches of the World Wide Web, the great seventeenth-century English poet John Milton— and, in particular, his unsurpassed epic. Paradise Lost—lives on in what seems, at first, an unlikely milieu: that of late twentieth and early twenty-first-century American and British popular culture. To wit: in the “Introduction” to their fascinating and timely collection of essays, Milton in Popular Culture, editors Laura Lunger Knoppers and Gregory M. Colon Semenza reveal that the seemingly imposing esoteric nature of Milton’s writing has tended to make this author and his works “more difficult to dislodge and appropriate for contemporary and popular concerns” while, in addition, “factors in contemporary academe seem to drive a wedge between Milton and popular culture. Unlike Shakespeare, whose ‘negative capability’ often seemed to transcend the culture wars, Milton became a lightning rod in the canon debates that rocked and, in some cases, divided English departments in the 1980s and 1990s. For some,” in fact, “safeguarding Milton against the encroachments of cultural studies and theory was tantamount to defending the canon and Western tradition itself’ (5). Kjioppers and Colon Semenza, however, contend “that far from threatening the Miltonic legacy, popular forms” of entertainment “give new currency to Milton, making his works a vital, living part of contemporary culture” (6). Thus, in many respects, Milton in Popular Culture functions as a significant corrective to the overly highbrow and utterly elitist determinations of those who have fashioned themselves (or have attained the title by default) the cultural guardians of the West. Knoppers and Colon Semenza later note that “Milton courses typically begin with discussion of the [popular] texts that Milton himself had appropriated: Homer’s ///W and Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, the biblical books of Genesis and Revelation,” after which they posit the notion “that it is equally useful and important to introduce students to some of the films, books, music.