"apt numbers"

on line citations of Paradise lost

David Currell

pp. 77-108

in: David Currell, Islam Issa (eds), Digital Milton, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018

Abstract

"Apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another": so Milton describes the verse of Paradise Lost. Practices of citation and remediation, however, may radically detach individual lines from their poetic context, interrupting or ignoring the epic's usual linear flow. Analyzing the OED, Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, and Twitter, and historicizing the logics of these textual spaces in terms of practices already established in the Renaissance (commonplacing and consultation reading), this chapter discusses the function and phenomenology of the lineated deformance of Paradise Lost within print and digital media, and assays a graphical "x-ray" of its presence in the reference works. The chapter reflects and reflects on the role of numbers and data visualization in the age of digital literary studies.