Milton in the Long Restoration

Edited by Blair Hoxby and Ann Baynes Coiro

Explores Milton's relationship to his contemporaries and early eighteenth-century heirs
Demonstrates that some of Milton's earliest readers were more perceptive than Romantic and twentieth-century interpreters

Milton in the Long Restoration

Edited by Blair Hoxby and Ann Baynes Coiro

Description

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.

Milton in the Long Restoration

Edited by Blair Hoxby and Ann Baynes Coiro

List of Figures
Note on the Text and List of Abbreviations
List of Contributors
Introduction. Why Milton in the Long Restoration, Blair Hoxby
I. RECEPTION AND INTERPRETATION
1. Milton's Spots: Addison on Paradise Lost, Denise Gigante
2. Critical Mass: Contextualizing Bentley's Paradise Lost, David A. Harper
3. 'A Fine Paradisaical Notion': Materialism and Readings of Paradise Lost in the 'Long Restoration', N. K. Sugimura
4. 'In the Dun Air Sublime': Milton, the Richardsons, and the Invention of Aesthetic Categories, Blair Hoxby
II. THE DRAMATIC AND THEATRICAL MILTON
5. Milton's Essay of Dramatic Poesy: Samson Agonistes, Ann Baynes Coiro
6. John Dennis, John Locke, and the Sublimation of Revolt: Samson Agonistes after the Glorious Revolution, Catherine Gimelli Martin
7. 'To Secure Our Freedom': How A Mask Presented at Ludlow-Castle Became Milton's Comus, Blaine Greteman
8. Milton Modulated for Handel's Music, Ruth Smith
III. LINEAL DESCENTS AND CLANS
9. John Dryden Meets, Rhymes, and Says Farewell to John Milton: A Restoration Drama in Four Scenes, Steven N. Zwicker
10. 'I Still Deny'd, Much Pleas'd to Hear You Sue': Milton's Eve, Ovid, and the Restoration Coquette, Laura L. Knoppers
11. Angel Bodies to Whig Souls: Blank Verse after Blenheim, Dustin D. Stewart
12. Yet Once More: Milton's Lyric Descendants, Christopher R. Miller
13. Milton's Pope, Sophie Gee
IV. CONDITIONS OF LIBERTY
14. The Circling Hours: Revolution in Paradise Regained, Gregory Chaplin
15. 'In Power of Others, Never in My Own': The Meaning of Slavery in Samson Agonistes, Martin Dzelzainis
16. Milton and the Restoration Literae, Nicholas von Maltzahn
17. Milton, Newton, and the Implications of Arianism, Stephen M. Fallon
18. Friday as Fit Help, Mary Nyquist
V. WIDER WORLDS
19. Early Modern Marriage in a Secular Age: Beyond the Sexual Contract, Sharon Achinstein
20. Haak's Milton, Nigel Smith
21. Miltonic Texts and European Politics, 1674-1682, Jason Peacey
22. Purging the Visual Nerve: Exploration, 'Revelation', and Cosmography in Milton Commentaries and Criticism of the Long Restoration, Anne-Julia Zwierlein
23. Some Thoughts on Periodization: John Milton to Adam Smith and Beyond, Steven Pincus
VI. EPIC, MOCK EPIC, AND THE NOVEL
24. Milton, the Long Restoration, and Pope's Iliad, John Leonard
25. Paradise Lost and English Mock Heroic, Anthony Welch
26. Milton and the People, Joanna Picciotto
27. Paradise Lost in the Long Restoration, 1660-1742: The Parody of Form, Michael McKeon
28. Raphael's Condescension: Paradise Lost, Jane Austen, and the Secular Displacement of Grace, Paul Stevens
VII. MILTON'S LIVES
29. 'His Ears Now Were Eyes to Him': The Lives of Milton in the Long Restoration, Jayne Lewis
Bibliography
Index

Milton in the Long Restoration

Edited by Blair Hoxby and Ann Baynes Coiro

Author Information

Blair Hoxby is an Associate Professor of English at Stanford University. After graduating with an A. B. from Harvard University, he studied at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. He then earned his Ph.D. from Yale University. Before coming to Stanford, he was an Associate Professor of English at Yale and an Associate Professor of History and Literature at Harvard. He is the author of Mammon's Music: Literature and Economics in the Age of Milton; What Was Tragedy? Theory and the Early Modern Canon; and numerous articles on Milton, literary and cultural responses to nascent capitalism, early modern theater, and theories of tragedy.

Ann Baynes Coiro is Professor of English at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She is the author of a number of essays on a wide variety of topics, including Herrick, Jonson, Amelia Lanyer, the social connections of manuscript and print circulation, Stuart court culture, Cavalier poetry and the English revolution, and Restoration theatricality. In particular, she has published many essays on Milton's poetry. She will be the President of the Milton Society of America, 2016-17. Her first book was titled Robert Herrick's Hesperides and the Epigram Book Tradition. She has co-edited the recent Rethinking Historicism from Shakespeare to Milton.

Contributors:

Sharon Achinstein, Johns Hopkins University
Gregory Chaplin, Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts
Ann Baynes Coiro, Rutgers University
Martin Dzelzainis, University of Leicester
Stephen Fallon, University of Notre Dame
Sophie Gee, Princeton University
Denise Gigante, Stanford University
Blaine Greteman, University of Iowa
David A. Harper, United States Military Academy at West Point
Blair Hoxby, Stanford University
Laura L. Knoppers, University of Notre Dame
John Leonard, Western University in Canada
Jayne Lewis, University of California, Irvine
Michael McKeon, Rutgers University
Nicholas von Maltzahn, University of Ottawa
Catherine Gimelli Martin, University of Memphis
Christopher R. Miller, City University of New York
Mary Nyquist, University of Toronto
Jason Peacey, University College London
Joanna Picciotto, UC Berkeley
Steven Pincus, Yale University
Nigel Smith, Princeton University
Ruth Smith, freelance scholar
Paul Stevens, University of Toronto
Dustin D. Stewart, Columbia University
N. K. Sugimura, Georgetown University
Anthony Welch, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Anne-Julia Zwierlein, University of Regensburg

Milton in the Long Restoration

Edited by Blair Hoxby and Ann Baynes Coiro

Reviews and Awards

"This is a brick of a book: 575 pages of text, and 29 contributors who together comprise a Homeric catalogue of distinguished Miltonists [...] overall the essays are deeply impressive." --Peter C. Herman, San Diego State University, in Milton Quarterly

"it is hard to think of a recent book with "Restoration" in the title that can compare to Milton in the Long Restoration either in terms of substance or as an event: certainly not a collection of essays, nor is there a similarly magisterial Handbook of Restoration Literature to which we might point ... the individual brilliance of the essays is not in doubt -- no mean feat for a book this capacious and wide-ranging ... I hope I have given some sense of its scope and of its unflinching quality." --Matthew C. Augustine, Huntington Library Quarterly

"Milton in the Long Restoration, edited by Blair Hoxby and Ann Baynes Coiro, is a thoughtful collection of unexpected approaches to the great poet of the seventeenth century."--George E. Haggerty, SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900