3 Review(s)

Stanley Fish, one of the foremost critics of literature working today, has spent much of his career writing and thinking about Milton. This book brings together his finest published work with brand new material on Milton and on other authors and topics in early modern literature. In his analyses of Renaissance texts, he meditates on the interpretive problems that confront readers and offers a sustained critique of historicist methods of interpretation. Intention, he argues, is key to understanding which pieces of historical data are relevant to literary criticism. Lucid, provocative, direct and inimitable, this new book from Stanley Fish is required reading for anyone teaching or studying Milton and early modern literary studies. Table of Contents Introduction Part I. Milton: 1. The Brenzel lectures 2. To the pure all things are pure: law, faith and interpretation in the prose and poetry of John Milton 3. 'There is nothing he cannot ask': Milton, liberalism, and terrorism 4. Why Milton matters, or against historicism 5. Milton in popular culture 6. How the reviews work 7. The New Milton criticism Part II. Early Modern Literature: 8. Void of storie: the struggle for insincerity in Herbert's prose and poetry 9. Authors-readers: Jonson's community of the same 10. Marvell and the art of disappearance 11. Masculine persuasive force: Donne and verbal power 12. How Hobbes works Index.