Milton's Late Poems

Lee Morrissey is Alumni Distinguished Professor of English at Clemson University, USA. He is the author of The Constitution of Literature: Literacy, Democracy, and Early English Literary Criticism (2008) and From the Temple to the Castle: An Architectural History of English Literature, 1660-1760 (1999), and is a co-author of English Literature in Context (2008, rev. 2nd ed. 2017).

• Introduction: Forms of modernity; 1.'Sense variously drawn': On reading Paradise Lost; 2. The Reformation of Paradise Lost: Moderating modernity with measurement; 3. Paradise Regained: An aesthetic for a new ascetic; 4. Samson's modernity: A tragedy of beset manhood; Conclusion: 'The modern paradox': Temporal forms of modernity.

'Milton's Late Poems: Forms of Modernity offers shrewd and sophisticated counter-intuitive interpretations of Milton's major poems Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes in relation to formulations of modernity. Arguing that Milton encourages the interrogation of the theoretical categories by which modernity would be made legible, Dr. Morrissey develops provocative and adventurous analyses that cut against the grain of historicist interpretation and familiar literary narratives. Highly generative in thought, this study demonstrates how each of Milton's late poems tells a different story about what the engagement with theories of modernity makes possible. Forms of Modernity will intrigue and reward Milton scholars and scholars of modernity, while challenging those caught up in a narrative of secularization.' Elizabeth Sauer, Brock University