The New Milton Studies,
MSt C-option Hilary Term 2008
Sharon Achinstein
There is a new eclecticism in early modern studies. New topics--such as ecocriticism, the
study of sexuality, the passions, aesthetics and ethics--have built upon the historicist work
of the two most significant approaches of the 1980s and 1990s, feminism and politics.
Some of these new approaches have made a fundamental challenge to ideologicaloriented criticism dominant in Milton studies in the last two decades. This course has
two aims: to cover a wide range of Milton’s poetry and prose; and to assess the relevance
and impact of recent critical approaches in Milton studies. While the focus is on Milton,
the critical issues raised and scholarship surveyed will be of use to those in the early
modern period more generally.
Course expectations: In addition to their primary and secondary reading, students will be
expected to write one critical essay; one brief position paper; and make one collaborative
class presentation.
Reading Assignments: Over the vacation, you should read the primary literature
(Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes, 1645 poems, Areopagitica, Of
Education, Tenure of Kings and Magistrates), so that you can enter into the critical
debates armed with a basic understanding of Milton’s oeuvre.
Course Outline
The readings listed below represent a wide array from which particular assignments will
be drawn and form a preliminary bibliography to research. We will whittle down the
secondary readings list in consultation with students’ interests so that there is a
manageable amount each week.
Week 1. Ideologies: Politics and Religion
This week we will explore Milton’s political thought and action, assessing the shift in
critical attention from politics to religion, and consider Milton’s place in republican or
radical traditions.
Primary: Areopagitica, Of Education, Tenure of Kings and Magistrates
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Possible Secondary Readings:
John Coffey, ‘Quentin Skinner and the religious dimension of early modern political
thought’, in A. Chapman, J. Coffey and B. Gregory (eds), Seeing Things their Way:
Intellectual History and Religious Belief (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007)
John Coffey, ‘Pacifist, quietist or patient militant? John Milton and the Restoration',
Milton Studies, 42: ‘Paradise Regained' in Context, A. Labriola and D.
Loewenstein (eds), (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003).
Martin Dzelzainis, “Republicanism,” in Thomas Corns, ed., A Companion to Milton
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 294-308.
Gina Hausnecht, “The Gender of Civic Virtue,” in Catherine Gimelli Martin, ed., Milton
and Gender (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 19-33.
Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (1977).
David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999).
Ernest Sirluck, Introduction, Complete Works of John Milton, vol. 2 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1959).
Quentin Skinner, “John Milton and the Politics of Slavery,” Milton and the Terms of
Liberty, eds., Joad Raymond and Graham Parry (Cambridge: Brewer, 2002), 1-22.
Week 2: Sexuality and the Passions
This week we debate the centrality of passion and sexuality in Milton’s ethical and
political vision. We will track how critics have extended the insights of feminist
criticism towards questions of sexuality, the body and the passions, and consider the
relevance of an account of passions for understanding an author’s politics.
Primary: Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Paradise Lost
Possible Secondary:
David Hawkes, “The Politics of Character in Milton’s Divorce Tracts,” Journal of the
History of Ideas 62:1
Victoria Kahn, Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 16401674 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
Michael Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1999).
----. “Commotion Strange: Passion in Paradise Lost” in Paster, Rowe and FloydWilson, eds., Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History
of Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
Rei Terada, Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the ‘Death of the Subject’ (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
James Grantham Turner, Libertines and Radicals in Early Modern London: Sexuality,
Politics and Literary Culture, 1630-1685 (Cambridge, 2002).
Week 3. The Human
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This week continues the previous week’s concerns with Milton’s account of affection and
the bonds of sociability by examining how Milton imagines the basic unit of politics and
religion: the human being. Rather than to focus on political ideologies, recent critics
have been asking about biopolitics—the regimes of ordering life. So, we will ask, What
is it to be human, in Milton? With an epic filled with non-human sorts (Angels, devils),
how does Milton construct an account of humanity as distinctive and ethically powerful?
If the class wishes, we may instead consider debates over the ‘humanity’ of Christ in
early modern theology.
Primary Readings: Epitaphium Damonis, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained
Possible Secondary Readings:
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, tr. Daniel HellerRoazen. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
Bruce Boehrer, "Animal Love in Milton: The Case of the ‘Epitaphium Damonis,’" ELH
70 (2003), 787–811.
Brian Cummings, “Animal Passions and Human Sciences: Shame, Blushing and
Nakedness in Early Modern Europe and the New World,” in Erica Fudge, Ruth
Gilbert and Susan Wiseman, eds., At the Borders of the Human (Basingstoke,
Palgrave, 2002), 26-50.
Stephen Fallon, “The Metaphysics of Milton’s Divorce Tracts,” in Politics, Poetics and
Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose, eds., James Grantham Turner and David
Loewenstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
Erica Fudge, Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in early Modern English Culture
(London: Macmillan, 2000): Ch. 6: “The Bestialization of Humanity and the
Salvation of the Beast: The Politics of the Animal Soul,” 143-66.
Emmanuel Levinas, “The Name of a Dog: or, Natural Rights,” Difficult Freedom:
Essays on Judaism (London: Athlone, 1990).
Michael Lieb, Theological Milton: Deity, Discourse and Heresy in the Miltonic Canon
(Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 2006).
John Rogers, “John Milton and the Heretical Priesthood of Christ,” 203-220 in David
Loewenstein and John Marshall, eds., Heresy, Literature and Politics in Early
Modern English Culturre (Cambridge: CUP, 2007).
Rachel Trubowitz, “Body Politics in Paradise Lost,” PMLA 121:2 (2006), 388-404.
Week 4. Ecocriticism: Beyond Pastoral
The early modern period saw a new, more scientific and objective approach to the natural
world, and we will examine how Milton reflected and contributed to new imaginings with
respect to land, place, and space. Rather than to look at the landscapes of early modern
literature in the literary and political terms of pastoral or Georgic, recent scholars have
taken up questions of Deep Ecology—the relation of humans to their natural world—and
Milton’s Paradise Lost offers much material in which to investigate the harmonies and
disharmonies in the human experience of nature.
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Paradise Lost, Eden books
Possible Secondary Readings:
Lawrence Buell, “The Ecological Insurgency,” New Literary History 30:3 (1999), 699712.
Karen Edwards, Milton and the Natural World (Cambridge, 1999).
Ken Hiltner, Milton and Ecology (Cambridge, 2003).
John R. Knott, "Milton's Wild Garden," Studies in Philology 102:1 (2005), 66–82.
Diane Kelsey McColley, "Beneficent Hierarchies: Reading Milton Greenly" in
Spokesperson Milton, ed. Charles W. Durham and Kristin Pruitt McColgan (1994),
pp. 231–48.
-----. "‘All in All’: The Individuality of Creatures in Paradise Lost," in "All in All":
Unity, Diversity and the Miltonic Perspective, ed. Charles W. Durham and Kristin
A. Pruitt (1999), pp. 231–38.
-----. "Milton's Environmental Epic: Creature Kinship and the Language of Paradise
Lost," in Beyond Nature Writings: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism, ed.
Karla Armbruster and Kathleen R. Wallace (2001), pp. 57–74.
-----. “The Commodious Ark: Nature’s Voice in Early Modern Poetry,” in John Parham,
ed., The Environmental Tradition in English Literature (Aldershot, 2002), 130-43.
Joanna Picciotto, "Reforming the Garden: The Experimentalist Eden and Paradise Lost,"
ELH 72 (2005): 23-78.
Nick Pici, in "Milton's ‘Eco-Eden’: Place and Notions of the ‘Green’ in Paradise Lost,"
College Literature 28 (2001), 33–50.
Jeffrey S. Theis, in "The Environmental Ethics of Paradise Lost: Milton's Exegesis of
Genesis 1. 3," Milton Studies 34 (1997), 61–81.
Week 5. Paradise Lost: The New Aestheticism
In our attention to history, politics and theology, have we forgotten poetry? Need there
be a chasm between politics and aesthetics?
Paradise Lost
Possible Secondary:
Stanley Fish, “Why Milton Matters,” Milton Studies 44 (2005), 1-12.
Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton UP, 1999), Part 2.
Gordon Teskey, Delirious Milton: The Fate of the Poet in Modernity (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2006).
James Grantham Turner, “The aesthetics of divorce: "masculinism," idolatry, and poetic
authority in Tetrachordon and Paradise Lost,” in Catharine Gimelli Martin, ed.,
Milton and Gender (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 34-52.
Jonathan Dollimore, “Art in Time of War: Towards a Contemporary Aesthetic,” 36-50 in
Simon Malpas and John J. Joughin, The New Aestheticism (Manchester UP, 2003).
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Mark Robson, “Defending Poetry: or, Is there an Early Modern Aesthetic?,” 119-130 in
Malpas and Joughin.
High Theory:
Theodor Adorno et al, Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 2007).
Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (London: Continuum, 2006).
Week 6. Presentism and Ethics
The matter of violence and terrorism in our own world has sparked discussion about
Milton’s advocacy of violence. This week, we will explore recent critics who have
insisted upon the relation between present and past and have highlighted the ethical as
prior to the political.
Primary: Samson Agonistes and Paradise Regained
Secondary:
Ewan Fernie, “Shakespeare and the Prospect of Presentism,” Shakespeare Survey 58
(2005), 169-84.
Marshall Grossman and Sharon Achinstein, “Ethics or Politics? An Exchange Passing
through Areopagitica,” in Marshall Grossman, ed., Reading Renaissance Ethics
(London: Routledge, 2007).
Victoria Kahn, “Aesthetics as Critique: Tragedy and Trauerspiel in Samson Agonistes,”
in Marshall Grossman, ed., Reading Renaissance Ethics (London, 2007), 104-128.
Julia Reinhard Lupton, chapter on Samson in Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political
Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2005).
Julie Stone Peters, “’A ‘Bridge over Chaos’: De Jure Belli, Paradise Lost, Terror,
Sovereignty, Globalism and the Modern Law of Nations,” Comparative Literature
57:4 (2005), 273-93.
Paul Stevens, “Intolerance and the Virtues of Sacred Vehemence,” in Sharon Achinstein
and Elizabeth Sauer, eds., Milton and Toleration (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2007), 243-267.
Bibliography: Recommended Editions of Milton:
Paradise Lost; Complete Shorter Poems Longmans, eds. A. Fowler & J. Carey, 2 vols.
(1968: 2nd ed, 1997, 1998).
OR
Merritt Hughes, ed., John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose (New York:
Odyssey Press, 1957)
For ‘original editions,’ you may wish to consult EEBO or Harris Francis Fletcher, ed.
John Milton’s Complete Poetical Works Reproduced in Photographic Facsimile (Urbana,
1943-45), 4 vols.
For Prose: The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, Gen. Ed., Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols.,
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953-1982): best for library reference with good
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introductions but you should also look at the Columbia edition (18 vols.), ed. Frank
Patterson, which prints Milton’s Latin prose alongside English translations.
Milton’s Political Writings [i.e Tenure and A Defence], ed. Martin Dzelzainis, Cambridge
History of Political Thought series, (1991).
Biography: B.K. Lewalski The Life of John Milton (Blackwell, 2000). Also available,
William Riley Parker, revised and edited by Gordon Campbell, Milton: A Biographical
Commentary 2 vols. (Oxford, 1996).