Milton, Time, and Narrative: "Now, / While Time Was"

Abstract:Paul Ricoeur's poetics illuminate time and narrative in John Milton's Paradise Lost. Ricoeur asserts the intimacy of narrative with human time, addresses the interweaving of narrative histories and fictions, and extends Augustine's subjective theory of temporality and Aristotle's objective theory of narrative form. Tradition, understood as sedimentation and innovation over successive generations, is a temporal concept that is evident in the Augustinian and Aristotelian roots of Ricoeur's poetics, as it is throughout Paradise Lost. Narrative's intimacy with time casts light on Milton's artistry and its human significance, including his narrator and plot and the metamorphic tradition that informs his Satan.