John Milton lived at a time when English nationalism became entangled with principles and policies of cultural, religious, and ethnic tolerance. Combining political theory with close readings of key texts, this study examines how Milton's polemical and imaginative literature intersects with representations of English Protestant nationhood. Through detailed case studies of Milton's works, Elizabeth Sauer charts the fluctuating narrative of Milton's literary engagements in relation to social, political, and philosophical themes such as ecclesiology, exclusionism, Irish alterity, natural law, disestablishment, geography, and intermarriage. In so doing, Sauer shows the extent to which nationhood and toleration can be subjected to literary and historicist inquiry. Her study makes a salient contribution to Milton studies and to scholarship on Early Modern literature and the development of the early nation-state.

Product Description: The New Milton Criticism seeks to emphasize ambivalence and discontinuity in Milton's work and interrogate the assumptions and certainties in previous Milton scholarship. Contributors to the volume move Milton's open-ended poetics to the center of Milton studies by showing how analyzing irresolvable questions - religious, philosophical and literary critical - transforms interpretation and enriches appreciation of his work...read more

Product Description: This volume contains primary materials and introductory essays on the historical, critical and theoretical study of "national literature", focusing on the years 1550 – 1850 and the impact of ideas of nationhood from this period on contemporary literature and culture...read more

Product Description: Scholarly criticism of John Milton's writings has in recent decades been distinguished by a methodological prudence that separates it from other forms of literary scholarship. One critic, however, stands apart from his colleagues and has consistently offered a corrective to this prudence: Balachandra Rajan...read more

Product Description: The mass production and dissemination of printed materials were unparalleled in England during the 1640s and 50s. While theatrical performance traditionally defined literary culture, print steadily gained ground, becoming more prevalent and enabling the formation of various networks of writers, readers, and consumers of books...read more

Product Description: Filling a major gap in historical, literary, and post-colonial scholarship, Imperialisms examines the identity statements of the world's major imperialisms in multiple theatres of competition over the course of four centuries. Filling a major gap in historical, literary, and post-colonial scholarship, Imperialisms examines early identity statements and nuances of dominance of the world's major imperialisms in various theatres of competition...read more

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Product Description: Large 8vo. vi (ii), 376 pp, Introduction by Balachandra Rajan and Elizabeth Sauer, I. Contexts: 1. Dominion as Domesticity: Milton's Imperial God and the Experience of History by Janel Mueller; 2. The "Lordly Eye": Milton and the Strategic Geography of Empire by Bruce McLeod; 3...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This book examines the ambiguities inherent in the concept of the agon as a motivating, conflictual force behind creative and social expression. The notion of agonistics extends far beyond the literary fame lent it by Harold Bloom to embrace all aspects of culture...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Sauer investigates the texts' discursive practices and the politics of their orchestration of voice exploring the ways in which Milton's multivocal poems interrogated dominant structures of authority in the seventeenth century and constructed in their place a community of voices characterized by dissonances...read more