Literature and Dissent in Milton's England

The England of John Milton's great poems was the England of Dissenters, those who refused to join the state church after the return of monarchy in 1660 and were seen as dangerous outcasts and rebels. Sharon Achinstein reveals how a literary tradition of dissent was produced by those who suffered political defeat and religious exclusion in Restoration England. Disclosing a range of writing that has been largely and unjustly neglected, this important study is of interest to Milton scholars and seventeenth-century literary and religious historians.

Sharon Achinstein is Lecturer in English at Oxford University and a Fellow of St Edmund Hall, and has previously taught at the University of Maryland and Northwestern University. She is the author of Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (1994), which won the Milton Society of America's Hanford Prize, and edited Literature, Gender and the English Revolution (1994).