Introduction

Erin Murphy, Catharine Gray

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapter

Abstract

In the preface to their 1987 collection, Re-membering Milton: Essays on the Texts and Traditions, Mary Nyquist and Margaret Ferguson critiqued the modernist vision of The Living Milton offered by Frank Kermode’s 1965 volume of essays, replacing the organic image of the author as a “living poet” with a constructivist one emphasizing “that the figure of Milton the author is itself the product of a certain self-construction; and that signs of motivated self-constitution can be seen even more clearly in the various critical and cultural traditions in which Milton enjoys an afterlife.”1 Despite their poststructuralist skepticism about the term “living,” Nyquist and Ferguson’s volume is characterized by an intellectual liveliness, as the editors are joined by a group of scholars reveling in the density and complexity of their theoretically informed and, often, politically engaged readings of Milton. From their opening assurances that their volume “does not intend any ritual dismemberment,” in which they play with the image of themselves as castrating women, to their characterization of their volume’s contributors as outsiders to an academic community too often committed to representing Milton as the ultimate “educated, white and phallocratic elite” insider, Nyquist and Ferguson introduced Re-membering Milton with a rollicking proclamation of a kind of activist and interventionist scholarship, one that grounded itself in a deep theoretical and historical sophistication (xii, xv).

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationMilton Now
Subtitle of host publicationAlternative Approaches and Contexts
EditorsCatharine Gray, Erin Murphy
Place of PublicationNew York
PublisherPalgrave Macmillan
Pages1-25
Number of pages25
ISBN (Electronic)9781137383105
ISBN (Print)9781349480364
DOIs
StatePublished - 2014

Publication series

NameEarly Modern Cultural Studies 1500-1700
ISSN (Print)2634-5897
ISSN (Electronic)2634-5900

Keywords

  • Historical Moment
  • Historicist Method
  • Paradise Lost
  • Queer Theory
  • Woman Writer

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Cultural Studies
  • General Arts and Humanities
  • Linguistics and Language

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