Milton and Questions of History considers the contribution of several classic studies of Milton written by Canadians in the twentieth century. It contemplates whether these might be termed a coherent 'school' of Milton studies in Canada and it explores how these concerns might intervene in current critical and scholarly debates on Milton and, more broadly, on historicist criticism in its relationship to renewed interest in literary form.

The volume opens with a selection of seminal articles by noted scholars including Northrop Frye, Hugh McCallum, Douglas Bush, Ernest Sirluck, and A.S.P. Woodhouse. Subsequent essays engage and contextualize these works while incorporating fresh intellectual concerns. The Introduction and Afterword frame the contents so that they constitute a dialogue between past and present critical studies of Milton by Canadian scholars.

First published in 1987. Passionately praised and equally passionately criticised by contemporary and later writers, the figure of Milton inherited by the twentieth century is by no means unified, despite the appearance of monumental unity his work sometimes acquires in the classroom and in academic criticism. This collection of essays gathers together disparate and often conflicting representations of Milton as author and cultural figure. Critics familiar with the traditions of Milton scholarship and with debates in literary theory reconstruct Milton from evidence provided by his own prose and poetry, by his contemporaries (including some little-known women writers), by Romantics such as Blake and Wordsworth, and, finally, by a tradition of Afro-American writing that reflects Milton's influence in ways previously unexamined by critics. The process of reconstruction can also be seen as a process of "re-membering." The volume draws inspiration from, but also interrogates, the figure used in Areopagita to describe the quest for truth. Likening Truth to the dismembered body of Osiris, Milton urges Truth's friends to seek up and down, gathering "limb by limb" the body scattered through time and space. Re-membering Milton includes work by established critics from both sides of the Atlantic. Together these contributors place Milton and different Milton traditions firmly within the arenas of modem critical debate. As a result, the collection will be of interest to a wide range of readers: scholars concerned with Milton and Renaissance literature and history; advanced undergraduates and graduate students; researchers in women’s studies; and all readers generally concerned with trends in literary and cultural theory.

First published in 1987. Passionately praised and equally passionately criticised by contemporary and later writers, the figure of Milton inherited by the twentieth century is by no means unified, despite the appearance of monumental unity his work sometimes acquires in the classroom and in academic criticism. This collection of essays gathers together disparate and often conflicting representations of Milton as author and cultural figure. Critics familiar with the traditions of Milton scholarship and with debates in literary theory reconstruct Milton from evidence provided by his own prose and poetry, by his contemporaries (including some little-known women writers), by Romantics such as Blake and Wordsworth, and, finally, by a tradition of Afro-American writing that reflects Milton's influence in ways previously unexamined by critics. The process of reconstruction can also be seen as a process of "re-membering." The volume draws inspiration from, but also interrogates, the figure used in Areopagita to describe the quest for truth. Likening Truth to the dismembered body of Osiris, Milton urges Truth's friends to seek up and down, gathering "limb by limb" the body scattered through time and space. Re-membering Milton includes work by established critics from both sides of the Atlantic. Together these contributors place Milton and different Milton traditions firmly within the arenas of modem critical debate. As a result, the collection will be of interest to a wide range of readers: scholars concerned with Milton and Renaissance literature and history; advanced undergraduates and graduate students; researchers in women's studies; and all readers generally concerned with trends in literary and cultural theory.

Slavery appears as a figurative construct during the English revolution of the mid-seventeenth century, and again in the American and French revolutions, when radicals represent their treatment as a form of political slavery. What, if anything, does figurative, political slavery have to do with transatlantic slavery? In Arbitrary Rule, Mary Nyquist explores connections between political and chattel slavery by excavating the tradition of Western political thought that justifies actively opposing tyranny. She argues that as powerful rhetorical and conceptual constructs, Greco-Roman political liberty and slavery reemerge at the time of early modern Eurocolonial expansion; they help to create racialized "free" national identities and their "unfree" counterparts in non-European nations represented as inhabiting an earlier, privative age. Arbitrary Rule is the first book to tackle political slavery's discursive complexity, engaging Eurocolonialism, political philosophy, and literary studies, areas of study too often kept apart.