Milton in the Long Restoration

Milton criticism often treats the poet as if he were the last of the Renaissance poets or a visionary prophet who remained misunderstood until he was read by the Romantics. At the same time, literary histories of the period often invoke a "long eighteenth century" that reaches its climax with the French Revolution or the Reform Bill of 1832. What gets overlooked in such accounts is the rich story of Milton's relationship to his contemporaries and early eighteenth-century heirs. The essays in this collection demonstrate that some of Milton's earliest readers were more perceptive than Romantic and twentieth-century interpreters. The translations, editions, and commentaries produced by early eighteenth century men of letters emerge as the seedbed of modern criticism and the term "neoclassical" is itself unmasked as an inadequate characterization of the literary criticism and poetry of the period--a period that could brilliantly define a Miltonic sublime, even as it supported and described all the varieties of parody and domestication found in the mock epic and the novel. These essays, which are written by a team of leading Miltonists and scholars of the Restoration and eighteenth century, cover a range of topics--from Milton's early editors and translators to his first theatrical producers; from Miltonic similes in Pope's Iliad to Miltonic echoes in Austen's Pride and Prejudice; from marriage, to slavery, to republicanism, to the heresy of Arianism. What they share in common is a conviction that the early eighteenth century understood Milton and that the Long Restoration cannot be understood without him.

Blair Hoxby is an Associate Professor of English at Stanford University. After graduating with an A. B. from Harvard University, he studied at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. He then earned his Ph.D. from Yale University. Before coming to Stanford, he was an Associate Professor of English at Yale and an Associate Professor of History and Literature at Harvard. He is the author of Mammon's Music: Literature and Economics in the Age of Milton; What Was Tragedy? Theory and the Early Modern Canon; and numerous articles on Milton, literary and cultural responses to nascent capitalism, early modern theater, and theories of tragedy.

Ann Baynes Coiro is Professor of English at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She is the author of a number of essays on a wide variety of topics, including Herrick, Jonson, Amelia Lanyer, the social connections of manuscript and print circulation, Stuart court culture, Cavalier poetry and the English revolution, and Restoration theatricality. In particular, she has published many essays on Milton's poetry. She will be the President of the Milton Society of America, 2016-17. Her first book was titled Robert Herrick's Hesperides and the Epigram Book Tradition. She has co-edited the recent Rethinking Historicism from Shakespeare to Milton.

Introduction: Why Milton in the Long Restoration?, Blair Hoxby
I. Paradise Lost: Reception and Interpretation
1. Milton's Spots: Addison on Paradise Lost, Denise Gigante
2. Critical Mass: Contextualizing Bentley's Paradise Lost, David Harper
3. "A Fine Paradisaical Notion": Materialism and Paradise Lost in the 'Long Restoration', N. K. Sugimura
4. 'In the Dun Air Sublime': Milton, the Richardsons, and the Invention of Aesthetic Categories, Blair Hoxby
II. The Dramatic and Theatrical Milton
5. Milton's Essay of Dramatic Poetry, Ann Baynes Coiro
6. John Dennis, John Locke, and the Sublimation of Revolt: Samson Agonistes after the Glorious Revolution, Catherine Gimelli Martin
7. 'To Secure Our Freedom': How A Mask Presented at Ludlow-Castle Became Milton's Comus, Blaine Greteman
8. Milton Modulated for Handel's Music, 1739-46, Ruth Smith
III. Lineal Descents and Clans
9. 'I still denied, much pleased to hear you sue': Milton's Eve, Ovid, and the Restoration Coquette, 'I still denied, much pleased to hear you sue': Milton's Eve, Ovid, and the Restoration Coquette
10. Angel Bodies to Whig Souls: Blank Verse after Blenheim, Dustin Stewart
11. Yet Once More: Milton's Lyric Descendants, Christopher R. Miller
12. Milton's Pope, Sophie Gee
IV. Conditions of Liberty
13. The Circling Hours: Revolution in Paradise Regained, Greg Chaplin
14. 'In power of others, never in my own': The Meaning of Slavery in Samson Agonistes, Martin Dzelzainis
15. Milton and the Restoration Literae, Nicholas von Maltzahn
16. Milton, Newton, and the Implications of Arianism, Stephen M. Fallon
17. Friday as Fit Help, Mary Nyquist
V. Wider Worlds
18. Early Modern Marriage in a Secular Age: Beyond the Sexual Contract, Sharon Achinstein
19. Haak's Milton, Nigel Smith
20. Miltonic Texts and European Politics, 1674-1682, Jason Peacey
21. Purging the Visual Nerve: Exploration, 'Revelation', and Cosmography in Milton Commentaries and Criticism of the Long Restoration, Anne-Julia Zwierlein
22. Some Thoughts on Periodization: John Milton to Adam Smith and Beyond, Steven Pincus
VI. Epic, Mock Epic, and the Novel
23. Milton, the Long Restoration, and Pope's Iliad, John Leonard
24. Paradise Lost and English Mock Heroic, Anthony Welch
25. Milton and the People, Joanna Picciotto
26. Paradise Lost in the Long Restoration, 1660-1742: The Parody of Form, Michael McKeon
27. Raphael's Condescension: Paradise Lost, Jane Austen, and the Secular Displacement of Grace, Paul Stevens
VII. Milton's Lives
'His Ears Now Were Eyes to Him': The Lives of Milton in the Long Restoration, Jayne Lewis
Index