Majestick Milton: British Imperial Expansion and Transformations of 'Paradise Lost,' 1667-1837.(Book Review)

Publication: The Modern Language Review

Publication Date: 01-OCT-03

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COPYRIGHT 2003 Modern Humanities Research Association

Majestick Milton: British Imperial Expansion and Transformations of 'Paradise Lost', 1667-1837. By ANNE-JULIA ZWIERLEIN. (Studien zur englischen Literatur, 13) Munster, Hamburg, and London: LIT. 2001. xi + 492 pp. DM 128. ISBN 3-8258-5432-9.

Anne-Julia Zwierlein's astonishingly energetic, wide-ranging, and sometimes quite brilliant Majestick Milton is an important book which, despite the problems I outline below, constitutes a significant contribution to the study of Milton's powerful cultural afterlife. Like many others before her, Zwierlein realized that when placed in the context of postcolonial literature and theory Paradise Lost took on a new look--Milton's biblical epic revealed many 'startling resonances' (p. 4) with the discourse of Western colonialism. Out of these resonances, self-consciously rejecting Lyotard, Zwierlein constructs a master narrative or grand recit (p. 3), indeed a story of all things imperial over the course of English literary studies' (increasingly) long Eighteenth Century, at the centre of which stands Milton's great poem. While Paradise Lost itself may have been written out of Milton's disillusionment with the promise of England's national...

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