The New Milton Criticism ed. by Peter C. Herman and Elizabeth Sauer

Abstract

Peter C. Herman and elizabeth sauer, eds. New Milton Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 253 + xii pages. $27.99.Reviewed by Lara DoddsThe New Milton Criticism, a collection of essays edited by Peter Herman and elizabeth sauer, opens with the assertion that this volume will interrogate various paradigms of certainty (1) that have dominated Milton studies. These essays (all but one are new) are the first explicit attempt to define a Milton criticism in theory and practice; the volume draws together the disparate strands of scholarship that, often in homage to the long-neglected work of william empson, have been among the most vibrant and challenging contri- butions to Milton studies for the last decade. Throughout the collection, Her- man's influential identification of the Miltonic serves as a touchstone for the new Milton criticism's primary method: the identification of uncertainty, alternatives, and disjunctions in monumental poetry.1 This book will be of interest to any Milton scholar for its identification of new critical and scholarly possibilities; however, a key theme in this book is the identification and recovery of lost critical traditions. This volume provides a prospectus for a Milton criticism but suggests that these new directions may be found through a more precise mapping of the field's histories.The New Milton Criticism is divided into two sections: Theodicies and Critical receptions. six essays in the first part contest Milton's relation- ship to normative Christianities (12) in the major poems. in one way or an- other, each of these essays challenges the contention, argued most forcefully in Dennis Danielson's Good God (1982), that Paradise Lost is an aesthetic success to the extent that its is successful or, in other words, to the extent that it solves the of evil, excuses God, and confirms the value of Christian faith. richard strier provides the most direct rejoinder to this influential argument in Milton's fetters, or why eden is better than Heaven, which is a revised version of an earlier essay.2 strier argues that the most problematic and contradictory (25) aspects of Paradise Lost stem from attempt to write theodicy, while the greatest success of the poem is in its representation of unfallen eden. Here Milton wrote without fetters and by doing so escaped the framework of choice, deliberation, and anxious duty (37) that is always present in Heaven.In one of the many examples of productive exchange between and among the essays in this volume, Thomas Festa's contribution, though found in the book 's second section, reads as a response to strier's redefinition of theodicy. Festa suggests that we transfer our attention from theodicy's traditional con- cern with to an alternative problem of good. He identifies an ironic theodicy centered on the character of eve and directed toward the exposure of the immorality of rationalizing the suffering of others, including Christ, as a way to secure consolation for evil (188). Festa's essay, like those in the volume's first half, contests the presumption, common in Milton studies, that choice and rationality are positive individual and social virtues. instead, these essays seek to identify the possibilities for a non-rationalistic or a non-orthodox reli- gious experience. John rogers's The Political Theology of argues that the absolutism of Heaven should not be understood as an anal- ogy-either positive or negative-for human political structure; rather, it pro- vides a poetic form for heretical view that God's acts are arbitrary rather than necessary. only this radical contingency allows God 's creatures unfettered freedom (79). Michael bryson's essay aligns the son of Paradise Regained with what he calls a Miltonic Gnosticism (103). Though Milton could not have had direct knowledge of Gnostic texts, his distinction between custom and knowledge represents an independent discovery of the Gnostic distinction between pistis and gnosis, which, in Paradise Regained, informs the son's attempt to leave an external concept of God for an internal concept of God, a God found without for a God found within (103). …