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Introduction
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1 Introduction To Repair the Ruins: Reading Milton presents essays united by their participation in the recent revival among scholars and critics with an interest in close reading—historically and theoretically informed attention to Milton’s poetic and rhetorical style—and in the history of that sort of reading. For the last two or three decades, Milton criticism has largely been concerned with history, and there have been good reasons for this, some having to do with wider trends in the academy, some with the nature of Milton’s work itself. In fact, in some ways, Miltonists have always been centrally concerned with what we sometimes call “context.” This is because the powerful authorial persona Milton created is one rooted in certain particulars of his biography—especially in his theological and political engagements . We have always been concerned, in other words, with what this man, John Milton, thought about, advocated, and did during the tumultuous decades of his life, and this concern has fit well with the turn the discipline has taken since the 1980s toward the political and cultural engagements of the literary text itself. As a result, a great deal of energy has been spent exploring not only the historical contexts of Milton’s poetry, but also his activities as a polemicist and political thinker. A quick survey of the most celebrated essay collections of the past few years illustrates the point. Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith’s The Oxford Handbook of Milton, for example, announces that 2 Introduction its purpose is to reflect what it takes to be “perhaps the most striking aspect of Milton studies in recent times”: “the rise of critical interest in Milton’s political and religious prose.”1 Leo Miller’s John Milton’s Writings in the Anglo-Dutch Negotiations , 1651–1654; David Armitage, Armand Himy, and Quentin Skinner’s Milton and Republicanism; Stephen B. Dobranski and John P. Rumrich’s Milton and Heresy; Balachandra Rajan and Elizabeth Sauer’s Milton and the Imperial Vision; Graham Parry and Joad Raymond’s Milton and the Terms of Liberty; Albert C. Labriola and David Loewenstein’s “Paradise Regained” in Context: Genre, Politics, Religion; Michael Lieb and Albert C. Labriola’s Milton in the Age of Fish: Essays on Authorship, Text, and Terrorism; Sharon Achinstein and Elizabeth Sauer’s Milton and Toleration; David Loewenstein and Paul Stevens’s Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England—all of them winners of the Milton Society of America’s Irene Samuel prize for essay collections—reflect a broad-ranging critical commitment to historical and contextual studies. The titles alone point to the field’s primary center of gravity.2 Since about 2001, however, while all of this has been going on, some words of dissatisfaction have arisen in certain quarters , and a growing number of scholars have begun to reassess and reapproach what Richard Strier calls simply “literariness,” those features that make verbal works of art distinctive, and which we have tended, sometimes, to forget about in our zeal to explore the ways in which such texts operate in the complex web of discourses that make up a culture.3 Critics like Strier and others have tried to provoke us back to attention to Milton’s language, not so much as a realm of autonomous literary production , but as a first lens through which we can interpret and assess whatever work Milton’s texts, especially his poetic texts, might be said to have done (or might still be said to do) in the world. At the 2008 Ninth International Milton Symposium in London, poet Geoffrey Hill, for example, advised literary critics to come back to the source—to the words themselves, where [100.24.20.141] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 23:38 GMT) Introduction 3 all things start. Stanley Fish publically declared in 2002 at an MLA session in New York City called “Why Milton Matters,” “It’s the poetry, stupid!” Several other critics, including a few represented in the present collection, have called in less stark terms for a revival of a trend in Milton studies that arose in the mid-twentieth century as part of the reaction against various modernist attacks on Milton, but that seemed to have been overwhelmed by contextual study before it had made good on all of its considerable promise. William Empson’s essays on Milton, as well as, of course, Milton’s God, took the literary details of Milton’s style very seriously, seeking to establish new terms for an appreciation...