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.