New edition of ‘Paradise Lost’ released, edited by featured scholar Gordon Teskey

A new Norton Critical Edition of Paradise Lost has just been released, edited by Gordon Teskey. Gordon Teskey is the featured scholar for Love’s Labours Lost and Measure for Measure, forthcoming in Season Two of ‘Shakespeare For All.’ He is Francis Lee Higginson Professor of English Literature at Harvard University, where he teaches Renaissance poetry. He is author of Allegory and Violence, Delirious Milton, Spenserian Moments, and The Poetry of John Milton, which was awarded the Christian Gauss Prize for Literary Criticism. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and is an Honored Scholar of the Milton Society of America. You can order his new edition of Paradise Lost from the Norton website.

“Teskey’s revised edition is as open as it is authoritative. There’s a genuine reverence for the poetic wisdom of Paradise Lost conveyed in these pages, and an equal sense that this is a poem we should be wrangling with on matters of race, religion, politics, and gender. New critical selections in each of those areas, augmented annotations, and a quick-reference Glossary of Names make this an ideal edition for learning—and for luxuriating in—this monumental poem.” —RAYNA KALAS, Cornell University

This Norton Critical Edition includes: 

• The 1674 text of Paradise Lost, with emendations and adoptions from the first edition and from the scribal manuscript. Spelling and punctuation have been modernized for student readers.

• An illuminating introduction and abundant explanatory annotations by Gordon Teskey.

• Source and background materials, including Milton’s greatest prose work, Areopagitica, in its entirety and key selections from the Bible.

• Topically arranged commentaries and interpretations—seventy-eight in all, thirty-nine of them new to the Second Edition—from classic assessments to current scholarship.

• A glossary of names and suggestions for further reading.