Milton in the Age of Fish: Essays on Authorship, Text, and Terrorism. Edited by MICHAEL LIEB and ALBERT C. LABRIOLA.

Abstract

The hyperbolic title of this latest collection of essays on Milton, assembled in honour of controversial critic Stanley Fish, instantly suggests that this is no ordinary festschrift. Many Miltonists will no doubt be surprised, if not troubled, to discover that they have been labouring for the past 40 years under the auspices of the ‘age of Fish’, which is not defined by the lifelong work of any number of other equally distinguished and important Miltonists, but solely by Fish's apparently ubiquitous, avatar-like ‘ “presence” in all aspects of Milton studies’ (ix). Moreover, the editors of the volume—themselves two pillars of the American Miltonist establishment—argue in their preface that Fish's insuperable ability to stir up controversy with his typically seductive, highly rhetorical, and hermetically sealed arguments is something to be admired and celebrated. Reminding readers, for example, that Fish's How Milton Works (2001) ‘unleashed a storm of controversy’ (ix), they are quick to aver that this is the sort of controversy ‘any author would be proud to claim as his or her own’ (ix). Whether or not one might share in this dubious sentiment, the principal that no publicity is bad publicity also informs Lana Cable's obsequious introduction. Here, Fish's former student clumsily attempts to manufacture controversy worthy of her mentor by recalling how a colleague of hers who once accused Stanley Fish, to her face, of being the Devil. Cable rounds off her little anecdote with the following appalling witticism: ‘Whatever first induced my fierce new colleague to identify Fish with the Prince of Darkness, he may since have found an opportunity to check his hypothesis, having succumbed prematurely to a failed, outraged heart’ (2). This tasteless opening gambit quickly backfires, however, as it forces the genuinely harassed reader to recognise that any discussion of Fish's ‘presence’ in Milton criticism as one who champions the ‘academic pursuit of truth’ (11) is surely as absurd as calling him the Devil.