Both English and Latin: Bilingualism and Biculturalism in Milton's Neo-Latin Writings (219pp.)

Review by Emma A. Wilson, Milton Quarterly 49.1 (March, 2015), 54-59:

‘This volume provides an invaluable new perspective on both Milton’s neo-Latin poems and also the major vernacular poetry by insisting politely but firmly upon the bilingualism of their author and the manifest effects of that bilingualism upon style and intertextuality in his corpus. Through a dextrous combination of manuscript research, modern understandings of bilingualism, and crucially meticulous and demanding close readings, this volume succeeds in vivifying a wealth of new relationships between Milton’s neo-Latin works and his vernacular poems … Haan is expert in probing and elucidating the multiple linguistic and cultural lenses through which Milton projects his work, and the resulting volume brings a new set of historical contexts and consequences for both the major and minor texts, whilst also more importantly furnishing an exciting new method with which to approach these works as a whole ... Haan's linguistic expertise and meticulous archival research combine to create a critical work in which discoveries gradually accumulate and speak to one another in very specific, nuanced dialogues between chapters ... opening up exciting new reading vistas ... The final two chapters, in which Haan harvests some of the fruits of her considerable and fantastic labor in the archives and in current linguistic research into bilingualism, bring to light fresh perspectives on some of Milton's major published poetic works.’


Both English and Latin: Bilingualism and Biculturalism in Milton’s Neo-Latin Writings (2012) (Back Cover):

Gordon Campbell, University of Leicester:
‘Estelle Haan is the world’s foremost authority on Milton’s Latin poetry, and probably the most distinguished student of that poetry in the history of critical commentary. This is a work of extraordinary authority written by a scholar at the height of her powers. In short, this is a terrific book, elegant and informative.’

Anne Mahoney, Tufts University:
‘This book ssucceeds in presenting Milton's poetry as a single, unified body of work. Its biggest strength is the many close readings of Milton's Latin verse as engagements with classical Latin literature. In addition to introducing the Latin verse to new readers, it provides a new approach to Paradise Lost, one that accounts for one of the difficulties of Milton’s text—its language—in a novel way.’


Abstract:

Both English and Latin examines the interplay of Latin and English in a selection of John Milton's neo-Latin writings. It argues that this interplay is indicative of an inherent bilingualism that proceeds hand-in-hand with a self-fashioning that is bicultural in essence. Interlingual flexibility ultimately proved central to the poet of Paradise Lost, an epic uniquely characterized by its Latinate vernacular and its vernacular Latinitas.

To avoid embarrassment, poetry should keep itself to itself”: an autoethnographic exploration of the place of poetry in adult literacy teacher education

This paper explores the reasons for the author’s reluctance to bring examples of her own poetry into her practice as teacher educator on a program for adult literacy tutors. The paper begins with the author’s poem, “The Place of Poetry”, which is used as a tool for reflection on the author’s assumptions about her identities as poet and as educator. The paper ends with poems written by the author’s students, which demonstrate that the use of poetry in education has the potential to facilitate transformative learning.

Spanish Golden Age Poetry in Motion: The Dynamics of Creation and Conversation.

The fourteen essays of this volume engage in distinct ways with the matter of motion in early modern Spanish poetics, without limiting the dialectic of stasis and movement to any single sphere or manifestation. Interrogation of the interdependence of tradition and innovation, poetry, power and politics, shifting signifiers, the intersection of topography and deviant temporalities, the movement between the secular and the sacred, tensions between centres and peripheries, issues of manuscript circulation and reception, poetic calls and echoes across continents and centuries, and between creative writing and reading subjects, all demonstrate that Helgerson's central notion of conspicuous movement is relevant beyond early sixteenth-century secular poetics, By opening it up we approximate a better understanding of poetry's flexible spatio-temporal co-ordinates in a period of extraordinary historical circumstances and conterminous radical cultural transformation