This collection of selected writings represents the best of recent critical work on Milton. The essays cover all stages of his career, from the early poems through to the later poems of the Restoration period, especially Paradise Lost. Professor Patterson includes British and American critics such as Michael Wilding, Victoria Kahn, James Grantham Turner and Mary Ann Radzinowicz and guides the reader through the varied ways Milton's achievement has been explored and debated by modern criticism.

    Chapter 1 Introduction; Chapter 2 Dating Milton, Jonathan Goldberg; Chapter 3 What It’s Like to Read L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, Stanley Fish; Chapter 4 Milton’s Early Radicalism, Michael Wilding; Chapter 5 The Politics of Milton’s Early Poetry, David Norbrook; Chapter 6 Areopagitica : Subjectivity and the Moment of Censorship, Francis Barker; Chapter 7 The Intelligible Flame, James Grantham Turner; Chapter 8 No Meer Amatorious Novel?, Annabel Patterson; Chapter 9 The Spirit of Différance, William Myers; Chapter 10 The Politics of Paradise Lost, Mary Ann Radzinowicz; Chapter 11 When Eve Reads Milton: Undoing the Canonical Economy, Christine Froula; Chapter 12 Fallen Differences, Phallogocentric Discourses: Losing Paradise Lost to History, Mary Nyquist; Chapter 13 Allegory and the Sublime in Paradise Lost, Victoria Kahn; Chapter 14 The Father’s House: Samson Agonistes in its Historical Moment, John Guillory;

    Biography

    Annabel Patterson