Speaker: Prof. John Rumrich, UT-Austin
Moderator: Prof. Shen Hong, Zhejiang University
Time: 10:00-12:00 am, Dec. 14, 2025
Venue: 紫金港校区东五201
Abstract: References to gunpowder begin early in English literary history, particularly in several of Shakespeare’s plays of moment to Milton. But prior to 1605, meaningful references are relatively rare and scattered. After the gunpowder plot is foiled, however, they become more plentiful and coherently suggestive, notably so in certain of young Milton’s poems and in his epic narrative of gunpowder’s origin. That episode occurs near the heart of the epic and is pivotal to the history of the War in Heaven and Satan’s postlapsarian character. Yet Milton scholars, with some noteworthy exceptions, pay it little attention, unlike subsequent narrators from Jonathan Swift to Cormac McCarthy who find it a compelling modern counterpart to the mythically allusive rendition of Sin’s birth.
Bio: John Rumrich teaches the works of John Milton, seventeenth-century British poetry, and Shakespeare’s plays at the University of Texas, Austin, where he is the Celanese Professor of British Literature. He has taught at universities in China, France, Ireland, and South Africa. He is an international consultant for the CMRS, ZJU. His publications include two monographs and two edited collections concerning Milton, various articles and book chapters, as well as the Norton Critical Edition of Seventeenth-Century Poetry and editions of Milton’s works for the Modern Library.
浙江大学教育基金会钟子逸基金资助
