 Shannon Miller
smiller@temple.edu
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Shannon Miller's current research focuses seventeenth century literature, especially the writings of John Milton and women writers. Her forthcoming book, “Engendering the Fall: John Milton and Seventeenth Century Women Writers” (University of Pennsylvania) examines the intertextual, and productive, connections between Paradise Lost and the writings of pamphleteers in the anti-feminist debate, women prophets during the Civil War, the poetry of Aemilia Lanyer and Mary Chudleigh, and historians of the civil war such at Lucy Hutchinson. She argues that early seventeenth century writers such as Rachel Speght and Aemilia Lanyer produced texts that influenced Milton 's representation of gender hierarchy within his epic, while later writers, such as Aphra Behn, Mary Chudleigh, and Mary Astell, returned to Milton 's epic within their own poetic and philosophical works. These texts are unified by their emphasis on the narrative of the Fall and the centrality of this motif as the story which must underlie all attempts to re-imagine, and re-organize society following the English Civil War. By differently imagining the organization of both the family and the state within their writings, these writers consequently offer views of governmental organization alternate to those that become codified within John Locke's Two Treatises of Government , published at the end of the century.
Miller's first book Invested with Meaning: The Raleigh Circle in the New World , was also published by University of Pennsylvania press in 1998. She has also articles in or forthcoming from The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies , Modern Philology , Milton Quarterly , and Studies in English Literature , as well as numerous articles in edited collections.
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