Milton's Modernities: Poetry, Philosophy, and History from the Seventeenth Century to the Present(Rethinking the Early Modern)

The phrase ""early modern"" challenges readers and scholars to explore ways in which that period expands and refines contemporary views of the modern. Milton's Modernities is a collection of eleven original essays undertaking such exploration with a focus on John Milton, a poet whose prodigious energies simultaneously point to the past and future. Bristling with insights on Milton's major works, Milton's Modernities offers fresh perspectives on the thinkers central to our theorizations of modernity: from Lucretius and Spinoza, Hegel and Kant, to Benjamin and Deleuze. At the core of this volume is an embrace of the possibilities unleashed by current trends in philosophy, variously styled as the return to ethics, or metaphysics, or religion. These make all the more visible Milton's dialogues with later modernity, dialogues that promise to generate much critical discussion in early modern studies and beyond. Such approaches necessarily challenge many prevailing assumptions that have guided recent Milton criticism - assumptions about context and periodization, for instance. In this way, Milton's Modernities powerfully broadens the historical archive beyond the materiality of events and things, incorporating as well intellectual currents, hybrids, and insights.

About the Author :
Feisal G. Mohamed is a professor of English at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and author of Milton and the Post-Secular Present: Ethics, Politics, Terrorism and In the Anteroom of Divinity: The Reformation of the Angels from Colet to Milton. Patrick Fadely is a graduate student in the department of English at the University of Illinois.

Review :
"The premise for this volume is significant, timely, and salient. The editors have declared the modernity of John Milton, a major, if not the major, poet in the English literary canon. The essays they have gathered demonstrate how reading Milton's works and studying key thinkers' interpretations of Milton can open new possibilities for both Milton Studies and studies of modernity. Thus, the volume successfully achieves its goals of reinvigorating Milton Studies and supplying alternative lenses for conceptualizing modernity." --Elizabeth Sauer, author of Milton, Toleration, and Nationhood and coeditor of Milton and the Imperial Vision "The volume as a whole marks a turn away from the historicism that has dominated Milton studies for the past three decades." --Modern Philology "What is exciting about the recent wave of Milton scholarship--and I include Milton's Modernities in that category--is that it builds on foundational new critical and historicist work to rethink the boundaries of Milton studies more generally. This timely and innovative volume will appeal not only to dyed-in-the-wool Miltonists, but also to scholars who may not think of themselves as Miltonists at all."--Melissa E. Sanchez, author of Erotic Subjects: The Sexuality of Politics in Early Modern English Literature "Comprising papers by such established Miltonists as Gordon Teskey and Lee Morissey, and also by a number of scholars at the beginning of their careers, the book provides a rich mélange of perspectives and readings. All the essays are cogent and learned... At their best, they suggest new ways of reading England's greatest poet while reflecting suggestively on a modernism whose legacy persists into the present moment. Recommended." --CHOICE