In the twenty-first century, where the interlocked crises of global warming, biodiversity loss, and environmental injustices grow by the day, historic texts and canonical authors are uniquely positioned to help us understand the cultures of extraction that have led us to this moment and to alternative kinds of worldmaking for ourselves and for future generations. Milton, poet of one of the most epic accounts of creation, edenic existence, and human reason and choice, is overdue for ecocritical engagements. This panel will consider the cross connections between Milton and twenty-first-century ecocritical studies.

This panel, which places a highly canonical author with a highly relevant contemporary critical field of inquiry, will welcome attendees from Milton studies, poetry and poetics, ecocritical and postcolonial studies, and the literary humanities at large. The panel incorporates a diversity of voices: it consist of three papers by three very differently situated women scholars in the academy: 1) a tenured full Professor, 2) a very recent PhD graduate and now independent scholar who is trying to find their foot in their beloved profession, and 3) a pre-tenure scholar on the tenure track. Further, all these scholars are committed to making their scholarship matter in our precarious world. The panelists will present papers of about 15 minutes each, thus leaving time for about 20 minutes of unstructured discussion at the end and opening avenues for onward dialogue and collaboration.

The paper titles and abstracts are as follows.

Earth Felt the Wound

Amrita Dhar

In Paradise Lost, almost as a necessary offset, the epic’s Creation account closely precedes the account of the Fall, thus throwing into vast relief the joy and sustenance of one natural world order on earth with the desolation and precariousness of the other. This paper will ecocritically examine the difference between the prelapsarian and postlapsarian understandings of the created world in Milton’s epic. It will read the poem’s attention to that change in the natural world, and the poem’s multiple inceptions of grief and hope resulting from that change. In closing, the paper will turn to a few selected contemporary ecocritical poetic engagements with Paradise Lost for a comparative reading that places the early modern past in dialogic conversation with our climate-emergent present.

Happy Eden: Affective Ecology and the Feeling of Place in Paradise Lost

Monica Multer

This paper argues that Paradise Lost defines happiness as a relational practice that can serve as a model for ecological care. Milton’s descriptions of Eden as a “happy seat” and “happy state” attach happiness to environment itself, while Adam and Eve’s being “happy in our mutual help / And mutual love” figures happiness as a practice of fellow feeling and care that binds humans to one another and their world. Eden is “happy” only insofar as such relations of reciprocity and active tending are sustained, so the Fall marks the breakdown of an affective ecology in which place and feeling are mutually supported. Read through Milton’s monistic vegetal model of life, the closing promise of “Paradise within thee, happier far” reimagines happiness as grounded in the material continuity of bodies and environment, offering mutual care as the form through which paradise and its environments might be repaired or restored.

Sky Loured

Tiffany Jo Werth

Shortly after Adam joins Eve in eating the “enticing fruit,” readers learn that not only “earth felt the wound.” In a disruptive metrical line charged by an additional syllable, the sky too changes temper. This paper extends an ecocritical reading into the heavens as a “cosmocritic.” Milton’s contemporary, John Goad, pioneers the term in 1686 to describe an investigation of the universe as one that connects celestial phenomena to terrestrial events. This paper will cosmocritically explore how the “muttering” of a changing sky is prelude to an elegy whose cosmic waves ripple into the future. It will engage the early modern past as an interlocutor with our own contemporary moment and its renewed interest in space and its relationship to our planet and environment.