Why Milton Matters: A New Preface to His Writings : a New Preface to His Writings

A poet of the seventeenth century, Milton with his future gaze may prove to be (singularly among the triumvirate of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton) the poet for the new millennium-the poet for the twenty-first century. Milton will be so to the extent that through him we see the upheavals in the humanities as deriving not from a revision of the canon but rather, as Bill Readings insists in The University in Ruins, from a crisis in the function of the canon and, then, to the extent that Milton shocks us into the recognition that poets sometimes deliver messages at odds with those with which they are credited. A poet of the seventeenth century, Milton with his future gaze may prove to be (singularly among the triumvirate of Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton) the poet for the new millenium - the poet for the twenty-first century. Milton will be so to the extent that through him we see the upheavals in the humanities as deriving not from a revision of the canon but rather, as Bill Readings insists in The University in Ruins from "a crisis in the function of the canon" and, then, to the extent that Milton shocks us into the recognition that poets sometimes deliver messages at odds with those with which they are credited. - Publisher. Wittreich demonstrates why Milton may prove to be the poet for the new millennium, in a book of interest to scholars and general readers. It engages the canonical Milton, as well as the Milton of popular culture, and uses the tools of theory- especially affective stylistics and reception history, to read Milton in his historical moment and our own. Front Matter....Pages i-xxv “Reading” Milton: The Death (and Survival) of the Author....Pages 1-59 Horizons of Expectations: Repressions, Receptions, and the Politics of Milton’s Last Poems....Pages 61-139 Questioning and Critique: The Formation of a New Milton Criticism....Pages 141-194 Back Matter....Pages 195-253