Milton, Toleration, and Nationhood

This study examines how Milton's polemical and imaginative literature intersects with representations of English Protestant nationhood.

Elizabeth Sauer (Author)

9781107615199, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 10 March 2016

234 pages
22.8 x 15.3 x 1.2 cm, 0.34 kg

'Sauer's book outlines a number of excellent arguments.' The Times Literary Supplement

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.

Note on editions
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. 'Temple-worke': Milton's literary ecclesiology
2. Reduction: civilizing conquests in Ireland
3. Natural law: Milton's post-revolutionary Defences of England
4. Disestablishment: divorce of church and state
5. Geography: spatial poetics
6. Exogamy: 'entercourse' with philistines
Epilogue.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: poetry & poets [DSC], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD], Literary theory [DSA]