English Language and Literature Fall 2015 Speaker Series

Milton's Hair:  A (Long) Eighteenth Century Entanglement

Jayne Lewis is Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine and the author, most recently, of Air’s Appearance: Literary Atmosphere in British Fiction (Chicago, 2012).

Her talk will explore later writers’ “entanglement” with the image, idea, and biomaterial of John Milton’s hair, including preserved locks, sonnets written about them, and the gruesome disinterment of Milton’s remains at St. Giles church, Cripplegate some hundred years after his death.