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Milton criticism often treats the poet as if he were the last of
the Renaissance poets or a visionary prophet who remained
misunderstood until he was read by the Romantics. At the same time,
literary histories of the period often invoke a Long Eighteenth
Century that reaches its climax with the French Revolution or the
Reform Bill of 1832. What gets overlooked in such accounts is the
rich story of Milton's relationship to his contemporaries and early
eighteenth-century heirs. The essays in this collection demonstrate
that some of Milton's earliest readers were more perceptive than
Romantic and twentieth-century interpreters. The translations,
editions, and commentaries produced by early eighteenth century men
of letters emerge as the seedbed of modern criticism and the term
'neoclassical' is itself unmasked as an inadequate characterization
of the literary criticism and poetry of the period-a period that
could brilliantly define a Miltonic sublime, even as it supported
and described all the varieties of parody and domestication found
in the mock epic and the novel. These essays, which are written by
a team of leading Miltonists and scholars of the Restoration and
eighteenth century, cover a range of topics-from Milton's early
editors and translators to his first theatrical producers; from
Miltonic similes in Pope's Iliad to Miltonic echoes in Austen's
Pride and Prejudice; from marriage, to slavery, to republicanism,
to the heresy of Arianism. What they share in common is a
conviction that the early eighteenth century understood Milton and
that the Long Restoration cannot be understood without him.
Reading literary texts in their historical contexts has been the
dominant form of interpretation in literary criticism for the past
thirty years. This collection of essays reflects on the origins of
historicism and its present usefulness as a mode of literary
analysis, its limitations, and its future. The volume provides a
brief history of the practice from its renaissance origins,
offering examples of historicist work that not only demonstrate the
continuing vitality of this methodology but also suggest new
directions for research. Focusing on the major figures of
Shakespeare and Milton, these essays provide important and concise
representations of trends in the field. Designed for scholars and
students of early modern English literature (1500 1700), the volume
will also be of interest to students of literature more generally
and to historians.
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