How Milton Works - Hardcover

Fish, Stanley

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674004655 ISBN 13: 9780674004658

Publisher: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001

Synopsis

Stanley Fish's Surprised by Sin, first published in 1967, set a new standard for Milton criticism and established its author as one of the world's preeminent Milton scholars. The lifelong engagement begun in that work culminates in this book, the magnum opus of a formidable critic and the definitive statement on Milton for our time.

How Milton works "from the inside out" is the foremost concern of Fish's book, which explores the radical effect of Milton's theological convictions on his poetry and prose. For Milton the value of a poem or of any other production derives from the inner worth of its author and not from any external measure of excellence or heroism. Milton's aesthetic, says Fish, is an "aesthetic of testimony": every action, whether verbal or physical, is or should be the action of holding fast to a single saving commitment against the allure of plot, narrative, representation, signs, drama--anything that might be construed as an illegitimate supplement to divine truth. Much of the energy of Milton's writing, according to Fish, comes from the effort to maintain his faith against these temptations, temptations which in any other aesthetic would be seen as the very essence of poetic value.

Encountering the great poet on his own terms, engaging his equally distinguished admirers and detractors, this book moves a 300-year debate about the significance of Milton's verse to a new level.

About this title

About the Author

Stanley Fish is Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His many books include There's No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It's a Good Thing Too.

Review

How Milton Works is a dazzling, rigorous, and unutterably strange attempt to follow the great seventeenth-century poet along the perilous path that leads away from the temptations of history and politics and into the fair fields of eternal Truth. Why strange? Because the book depends upon a perfect congruence between the fathomless faith of John Milton and the fathomless skepticism of Stanley Fish.
--Stephen Greenblatt, author of Hamlet in Purgatory

Stanley Fish still tempts us with an uncompromising, utterly undivided, un-Romantic Milton, who honors the beauty and fertility of the created world--and the creative powers of poetic or other kinds of self-regard--yet whose moral one-liners reject the slightest tendency toward an idolatrous displacement of creator by creature. In its close, illuminating, and iconoclastic readings of Milton's entire career as poet and doctrinal thinker, How Milton Works crowns Fish's own career.
--Geoffrey Hartman, author of A Critic's Journey: Literary Reflections, 1958-1998

Stanley Fish needs no recommendation to the community of Milton scholars. This will be the indispensable book on Milton for all succeeding generations.
--Victoria Kahn, author of Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance

I cannot think of a more impressive work of literary interpretation published in the past forty or so years. As a close reader--of just about anything--Stanley Fish has no peer.
--Frank Lentricchia, author of After the New Criticism

In How Milton Works, Stanley Fish defends his title as the reigning specialist on Milton by taking on all critical challengers single-handed. This forcefully and lucidly argued book is necessary both for readers and scholars of Milton, and for readers interested to see how Fish works at the height of his literary and rhetorical powers.
--Elaine Showalter, author of A Literature of Their Own

Admirers of Stanley Fish and his work will not be disappointed by the long-awaited Milton book, which posits theology as the foliation of style, syntax as the miniaturized performance of theology. It is a performance worthy of the Russian Formalists at their most concentrated and will open up all kinds of new questions, about literature fully as much as about the great revolutionary poet.
--Fredric Jameson, author of Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

Nearly 35 years after the publication of Fish's first landmark study comes this culmination of his lifetime of Milton scholarship...[Fish] shows himself to be a truly passionate critic, immersing himself in the texts...to explicate the remarkable philosophy that animates and informs them...What is at stake here is not artistic but moral truth and, implicitly, what Milton's radical vision might have to tell our own age. With forcefulness, fluency, and persistence, Fish succeeds in making his case and honoring his subject: a definitive work. (Kirkus Reviews 2001-04-15)

Acclaimed for more than 30 years as a great Milton critic, Fish still has much to teach. Here he dispels the confusion fostered in recent years by critics eager to convert the famed Puritan poet into a conflicted modern liberal, working out the tensions of his divided psyche in the drama of his spectacular art. Fish releases Milton from this Procrustean bed by restoring his integrity as a writer whose works expressed the timeless serenity of theological conviction...Though unfashionable, Fish's thesis proves remarkably luminous in explaining a wide range of Milton texts, from his sublime Paradise Lost to his polemical tracts. A masterful study indispensable for anyone who reads Milton.
--Bryce Christensen (Booklist 2001-04-15)

Fish gives us a premodern Milton, in which every element--vocabulary, syntax, line breaks--is directed from "the inside out" toward divine truth. Milton scholars will definitely have their summer reading cut out for them, but any reader interested in tracking an encounter across time-of one bottomlessly inquisitive, endlessly skeptical 17th-century mind with a similarly oriented, 21st-century critic idiosyncratically charged with belief-would be advised to stash this volume in their beach bag. (Publishers Weekly 2001-06-25)

How Milton Works is a remarkable exercise in a critical method of which Fish is virtually the unique exponent. It might be called 'forensic' criticism. Throughout its considerable length his book devotes itself with unflagging energy to the defense of a particular view of the poet, and to the refutation of all views that are not concordant with it, including, on occasion, Milton's own.
--Frank Kermode (New York Times Book Review 2001-06-24)

About this edition

• Publisher: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0674004655
• ISBN 13: 9780674004658
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 640