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COPYRIGHT 2007 Rice University
The books on nondramatic English Renaissance literature are notable this year for featuring a veritable renaissance of the author. Of the eighty-nine books received, forty were on single authors--whether in monographs, editions, collections of essays, or reference books. This statistic highlights a change from the omnibus reviews published in these pages between 2001 and 2006, when the average for single-author books was a little over twenty. In 2006, for instance, Mary Ellen Lamb reported, "there are only a few books about single authors" (46, 1: 196), while in 2004 Michael Schoenfeldt included only Spenser and Milton under the heading "Books on Single Authors" (44, 1: 191). Most importantly, perhaps, in 2005 Achsah Guibbory expressed her dismay at the "remarkable" number of books "about history," in which "viewing literature as art seems irrelevant," and she went so far as to assert, "we need a recommitment to literature among academic publishers. It's not just a matter that almost no press wants to publish a single-author book. There seem to be precious few publishing books that have much 'literary' focus" (45, 1: 213, 215).
In all cases, no doubt, a reviewer's professional interests determine the emphasis of the review, but the statistical alteration in this year's books does more perhaps than betray the present reviewer's eccentric proclivities. As if beginning to fulfill Guibbory's call, this year's books featured twenty-one authors from the early sixteenth century through the late seventeenth, ranging from Milton (thirteen books mention him in their titles), Spenser (6), John Donne (3), and Thomas Hobbes (3), to Francis Bacon (1), Ben Jonson (1), George Herbert (1), Sir Thomas Browne (1), and Andrew Marvell (1).
Complementing this emphasis on the individual author, books this year made language itself a major topic, with prodigious studies published by Harry Berger Jr., on Situated Utterances, Judith H. Anderson on metaphor, and Debora Shuger on Censorship. Perhaps more surprisingly, "English Literature" emerged as a significant category, with innovative overview studies by Jason Scott-Warren and Tom Betteridge, as well as Sean Keilen's Vulgar Eloquence, subtitled On the Renaissance Invention of English Literature. Perhaps most surprisingly, genre was a recurrent concern, in contrast to three years ago when Schoenfeldt wanted to have read more books on "form" (44, 1: 190). In fact, this year thirteen books on several genres begin to answer the prediction in 2001 by Heather Dubrow: "watch this space for the welcome recuperation of a historicized formalism" (41, 1: 192). In some intriguing patterns for comparison, this year saw two books on pastoral, one on epic, two on sonnet sequences, two on prose romance, three on biography and autobiography, and one on mother's advice books. The books on prose romance, by Steve Mentz and Katharine Wilson, make a strong case for recuperating the importance of this early modern form, long marginalized through modernist attention to poetry and drama. Additionally, six books were on textuality or print culture, and three were on translation, the former continuing an important trend, the latter hopefully signaling a new one. Specifically, most of the thirty-six monographs and collections nestled here under the rubric of single authorship speak to the literary as a category of early modern texts (of course editions support this enterprise). Thus, in this year's books the word "literature" itself shows up in fully eight titles and the word "literary" once, while "authorship" and "authority" show up three times.
In contrast, twenty-three books featured politics, while seventeen focused on gender and sexuality. A further thirteen continue the "back to theology movement" that we have witnessed in recent years. Together with the books on "literature," these books demonstrate a profession-wide commitment to the cornerstones of early modern culture (a word, by the way, that showed up in eleven titles). Many books build their edifice on more than one cornerstone; several important books, for instance, foreground the connection between the literary and the political or religious or sexual--what Dubrow called "hybridity" (41, 1: 192). Such a trend appears to reverse the one Richard Helgerson announced in these pages twenty years ago, in the heyday of the new historicism: "History, including historical event, has become a leading--perhaps the leading--concern of literary critics. The kind of cultural contamination we discover in setting Robert Sidney's poems next to his letters, the shifting welter of motives that upsets any transcendent 'literary' reading, is precisely what now most interests many critics" (26, 1: 146). In 2002, James Grantham Turner opened his essay by noting a change from the situation Helgerson described, "No single flavor, fashion, or method dominates this year" (42, 1: 173), while similarly Schoenfeldt reported, "there is no dominant paradigm, no sense of a narrow series of necessary texts and urgent engagements coalescing around a single theoretical model" (44, 1: 189).
Yet the books of 2006 register a slightly different narrative: amid our hybridity, we are experiencing a backlash to the revisionist model of authorship from poststructuralist, new historicist, and materialist criticism, which de-centers the individuated author in favor of cultural collaboration. This year, several books, such as Berger's or Keilen's, contribute to what might be emerging as a postrevisionist phase, by making their commitment to the author and the literary a matter of polemical theory, including several of the year's best books, the titles of which do not always make this clear: Gordon Teskey's Delirious Milton, Greg Walker's Writing under Tyranny, Curtis Perry's Literature and Favoritism, Jane Griffiths's John Skelton and Poetic Authority, Michael Lieb's Theological Milton, Patricia Phillippy's Painting Women, Daniel Juan Gil's Before Intimacy, Sharon Cadman Seelig's Autobiography and Gender in Early Modern Literature, Mentz's Romance for Sale in Early Modern England, Richard Chamberlain's Radical Spenser, and Wilson's Fictions of Authorship in Late Elizabethan Narratives. At their most useful, these books do not reject the notion of cultural collaboration so much as situate individuated authorship within it.
The year's focus on socially embedded authorial intentionality also underwrites a wide array of individual essays from the year's various collections, including an essay by Andrew D. Weiner, who draws on Cambridge historian Quentin Skinner to defend the need to deploy this mode of criticism, especially for early modern texts: "the essential question ... we ... confront, in studying any given text, is what its author, in writing at the time he did for the audience he intended to address, could in practice have been intending to communicate by the utterance of this given utterance. It follows that the essential aim, in any attempt to understand the utterances themselves, must be to recover this complex intention on the part of the author" (qtd. Weiner, in Challenging Humanism, ed. Ton Hoenselaars and Arthur F. Kinney, p. 57). Weiner contrasts Skinner's historical model with Stephen Greenblatt's new historical one, revealing the battleground over the author to lie in historical methodology itself. Emerging in this year's work, however, is not simply a dispute between cultural collaboration and individuated authorship, but also an increasing consensus: we can temper enthusiasm for materialist collaboration by letting the author have his or her due.
Despite our year of the author, a few of the most important books emphasize the collaborative model. Most notable are two books from the University of Chicago Press, Louis Montrose's The Subject of Elizabeth and Patricia Fumerton's Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England, but also Christopher Warley's Sonnet Sequences and Social Distinction in Renaissance England and Julie Crawford's Marvelous Protestantism: Monstrous Births in Post-Reformation England.
One book in particular, however, superbly jumps the gap between revisionist and postrevisionist criticism. As the title alone reveals, Jesse M. Lander's Inventing Polemic: Religion, Print, and Literary Culture in Early Modern England focuses on the conjunction of "religion" and "print" in early modern "literary culture"--this last phrase itself nicely intimating the yoking of cultural with literary matters.
In this cordial milieu, a number of more "traditional" books continue to find a home. My favorites are Allan Pritchard's English Biography in the Seventeenth Century: A Critical Survey, and J. Christopher Warner's The Augustinian Epic, Petrarch to Milton, both of which rely on a lucid prose style and disciplined mode of argumentation to foreground original theses about neglected topics.
Yet two of my favorite books do not directly join this conversation at all; curiously for a genetic Spenserian who dabbles in Christopher Marlowe and Shakespeare, both books are on Milton, and both foreground ideas that border on the thrilling: Thomas H. Luxon's Single Imperfection: Milton, Marriage, and Friendship; and David L. Sedley's Sublimity and Skepticism in Montaigne and Milton. Written in perhaps the year's most eloquent prose, matched and exceeded only by Teskey and Berger, Luxon and Sedley reveal just how Milton continues to inspire some of our best work. Having read countless books of "literary history" that do little more than describe the contents of obscure prose documents few have read, these books also provide some much-welcomed relief to the trend lamented by Dubrow: "I am particularly disturbed by the number of books that, aided and abetted by the conflation of New Criticism with any detailed scrutiny of the text, blatantly misread the passages they cite" (41, 1: 194).
Perhaps surprisingly, topics popular in recent years seemed in decline this year; there was, for instance, only a single book on Queen Elizabeth, by Montrose, while four engaged subjectivity in an important way (Montrose, Fumerton, Phillippy, to an extent Shuger), and just a few were on the body: Crawford's, and Mary E. Fissell's Vernacular Bodies: The Politics of Reproduction in Early Modern England, to an extent Berger's and Gil's. Not one book foregrounded "classical influence," praised as healthy in 2003 by Maureen Quilligan (43, 1: 233); and disappointingly, not a single book featured a female author, although perhaps the most unique book of all, from the Perdita Project at the University of Warwick, offers an anthology titled Women's Manuscript Poetry, which includes such figures as Mary Sidney (Herbert), Lady Mary Wroth, and Lucy Hutchinson.
Taking the cue of this last author, we may note that the English revolution, Civil War, and republicanism continue an important trend, featuring in seven books, including Diane Purkiss's Literature, Gender, and Politics during the English Civil War, my favorite in the group; Elizabeth Sauer's "Paper-Contestations" and Textual Communities in England, 1640-1675; Jonathan Scott's Commonwealth Principles: Republican Writing of the English Revolution; and Marcus Nevitt's Women and the Pamphlet Culture of Revolutionary England, 1640-1660.
In case readers are interested in where the year's books are being published, let me supply further statistics. Of the eighty-nine books received, forty-four come from presses in Britain, primarily Oxford (14 books) and Cambridge (13), but also Ashgate (7), Pal-grave (3), and Manchester (2). In contrast, 37 come from United States presses, including Delaware (4), Duquesne (3), Hackett (3), AMS (2), Susquehanna (2), Fordham (2), Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (2), and Michigan (2), but also Chicago (2), Johns Hopkins (2), Penn (2), Harvard (1), and Yale (1). Finally, seven books come from Canada, with five from Toronto. It is still a good idea for graduate students and their professors to write multiple-author studies, but this year the nineteen single-author monographs came from the following: Arizona, Cambridge, Chicago, Delaware, Duquesne, Edinburgh, Harvard, Michigan, Missouri, Oxford, Palgrave, and Susquehanna.
Without question, Great Britain continues to be more hospitable than the United States to books on the English Renaissance, while Oxford and Cambridge emerge as the most dynamic presses in the field. I'm disappointed that not a single book came from Cornell, in years past a frequent publisher of Renaissance books, nor from Princeton or Columbia. I am not surprised that books failed to emerge from Stanford, California, or Duke, but I am very pleased that Minnesota published Gil's Before Intimacy: Asocial Sexuality in Early Modern England, which, despite its title, makes a substantial contribution to the year's dialogue on authorship.
Readers might also like to have a breakdown for the kinds of books published this year: of the eighty-nine Amoretti-like books, fifty-nine were monographs; sixteen were editions; twelve were collections of essays; and two were reference tools. For those who fear academic publishing is in decline, the facts supply strong grounds not simply for hope but cheer. Peter McCullough's Oxford edition of selected works by Lancelot Andrewes is the year's most monumental editorial achievement. Yet readers will be delighted to know about Philip Pullman's Oxford edition of Paradise Lost and David Scott Kastan's update of Merritt Y. Hughes's edition of Milton's epic, the first a lovely coffee-table book for the family, the second destined to become a preferred paperback in the classroom.
For the purposes of this review, I will first examine books on single authors, in monographs, editions, collections, and reference tools. Then I will turn to four other cultural vectors: history, politics, religion, and gender and sexuality, where often (but not always) the topic of authorship plays a leading role. Since several books this year feature a particular (colonial) place, such as Ireland or Asia, I will devote a section to this work, before concluding with some summarizing remarks.
Of the eighty-nine books, I have settled on reviewing eighty-one. Of the remaining eight, four were paperback reprints of important hardbacks: Richard McCabe's Spenser's Monstrous Regiment: Elizabethan Ireland and the Poetics of Difference; Joad Raymond's The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks, 1641-1649; Ian Frederick Moulton's Before Pornography: Erotic Writing in Early Modern England, and Wallace K. Ferguson's The Renaissance in Historical Thought: Five Centuries of Interpretation. (The other four books seemed simply too far removed from "English Renaissance Literature.") In what follows, I devote more space to monographs and editions than to collections of essays or reference tools, although all four forms continue to perform valuable service to the profession. For reasons of space, I will also give shorter shrift than some would like to essays or chapters on drama and on national languages other than English. Finally, for readers in a hurry, I italicize authorial quotations and sometimes reviewer formulations that articulate what I consider the year's big ideas: those book-length theses particularly significant, resonant, or compelling for the study of what the field continues to call "English Renaissance Literature" (eight book titles) or "early modern" (seventeen titles).
BOOKS ON SINGLE AUTHORS
Milton -- 2006 was indeed a remarkable year for Milton studies. I begin with Milton (rather than, say, Spenser, or perhaps Sir Thomas More) not only because Milton drew the most books to him, but also because in the books about him we witness a profound challenge to revisionist models of collaborative authorship. Of the thirteen books that include "Milton" or his works in their title, nine are exclusively on Milton, including five monographs, three editions, and one collection of essays, while the other four treat Milton in a substantive way. In this latter group, both Sedley's Montaigne and Milton and Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake will be discussed in this section, because their fuller topics lie outside the boundaries of the English Renaissance.
Gordon Teskey's Delirious Milton may be not only the year's most stunning book but also the most important, at least in the terms I have charted. Combining his unusual critical voice with some of the most prodigious learning in the field, Teskey heeds the coaxing of his colleague at Harvard, Helen Vendler (p. v), and writes the book. Teskey argues that Milton's "double perspective--on divine Creation in the past and human creativity in the future" represents a watershed in the seventeenth century, and therefore in the history of art in the West: "the artist begins to play a new and unfamiliar role, as one who mediates spiritual power, like a shaman" (p. 2). As a shaman, Milton everywhere writes what Teskey calls, borrowing the word from Arthur Rimbaud, delirium (p. 4): "In Milton this delirium arises from an inner conflict between the authority of God the Creator ... and the poet's need to be a creator ... Milton's creative power is drawn from a rift at the center of his consciousness over the question of creation itself, forcing him to oscillate between two incompatible perspectives, at once affirming and denying the presence of spirit in what he creates" (p. 5). According to Teskey, Milton's spiritual creativity is "a resurgence into European culture, at the moment when the total authority of formal religion had begun its retreat before science, of very ancient, shamanistic practices mediated through art" (p. 5). Thus, "Milton is the last major poet in the European literary tradition for whom the act of creation is centered in God and the first in whom the act of creation begins to find its center in the human" (pp. 5-6). With superb chapters on Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes, Teskey manages nothing less than a spiritual poetics of Milton.
While Teskey's eloquence, learning, and argument are enough to make Delirious Milton an important book, something else leads me to identify it as a watershed event in recent criticism: in 2006, one of our most prestigious presses publishes a book by one of its English faculty, who sets himself the large-minded task of critiquing the dominant model of "ideological" criticism with a new kind of "spiritual" criticism: "Milton's ideological claims on us decrease even as his spiritual power over us grows" (p. 9). The critique of ideological criticism may not be new, but what is, I suggest, is Teskey's brilliant, innovative internalization of the criticism of Frye. For, as is well known, from the 1980s forward Frye became perhaps the most targeted object of ideological criticism, as his "archetypal criticism" gave way to the "new historicism" of Greenblatt, with Renaissance Self-Fashioning replacing Anatomy of Criticism as our most influential book. Written forcefully in response to recent historical criticism. Delirious Milton crafts out not a "cultural poetics" but a new spiritual poetics of the modern literary imagination. To highlight the significance of this moment, Greenblatt himself, another of Teskey's colleagues at Harvard, contributes a radiant endorsement on the jacket cover. In 2006, in other words, not simply does a compelling rift open between spiritual and ideological criticism, but theorists who once appeared opposed, now working at the same institution, genially contribute to the publication of the same book.
Nonetheless, perhaps in keeping with its title, Delirious Milton seems at times disoriented. Parts of Teskey's book read like lecture notes to undergraduates; there is no forecast about the book's chapter structure; certain sections seem to be from a different book, such as the opening of chapter 3 on the writing process; while on page 34, the book seems to begin again. On page 85, Teskey helps the reader see the bridge between chapters 4 and 5, but no such bridge navigates the divide between chapters 3 and 4, a deeply theoretical and philosophical discussion of how to approach Paradise Lost (via "interpretation" and "createdness") and the more conventional analysis of chaos, where Plato and Martin Heidegger give way to Regina Schwartz and John Rogers. The book even seems self-consciously aware of its own fragmentation, for the printer places small floral signs to set off its many units, some single long paragraphs. Yet in the face of some of the most gifted prose and profound thought this year, these limitations feel like quibbles. I am confident that Frye would be exceedingly proud of Delirious Milton, and not simply for its unusual fusion of stirring prose and stunning introspection. For Teskey takes the capacious canon of Frye's learning--and miraculously updates it, relying, for instance, on figures such as Walter Benjamin, whom I don't remember Frye privileging.
Even in this year's Miltonic delirium, it seems too good to be true that the editors of The Collected Works of Northop Frye published Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake, edited by Angela Esterhammer. Like many on the Toronto campus in the 1970s, Teskey absorbed himself in the teaching and writings of Frye, especially The Return of Eden, Frye's short and brilliant book on Milton, published in hardback in 1965 and in paperback in 1975. Thus, it is fascinating to consider the relation between Frye's and Teskey's books on Milton. Certainly, we can detect differences, even radical changes; but, like his mentor, the student of Frye focuses on the poet as creative artist, on the literary imagination, and on the poetic invention that transcends politics. Equally to the point, Teskey writes in a style we might call sublime.
For her part, Esterhammer has done a splendid job of assembling all of Frye's writings on both Milton and William Blake (with the exception of Fearful Symmetry, which appears in a separate volume). The Milton part of the book consists of four previously published essays, the full text of The Return of Eden, and an unpublished tribute to Balachandra Rajan. For those who might be interested, Esterhammer provides notes to The Return of Eden, complete with scholarly citations: at last! Her introduction is helpful and fascinating, reviewing Frye's major ideas about Milton but also situating them historically, in terms both of Frye's own work on Romanticism and of criticism of the 1960s through the 1980s. Above all, "Frye's Milton ... is a heroic Milton" (p. xxvi). As Esterhammer says, "in Frye's writings on Milton and Blake, as in the rest of his work, his genuine commitment to the human condition, to the issues confronting contemporary society, and to students as well as to nonacademic audiences, should be clear" (p. xxxiv). Frye was (and is) important for lots of reasons, but more than anyone he helped many understand the role of the literary critic and teacher in modern society.
Today, in light of the recent industry of scholarship on English republicanism, The Return of Eden is heady and astonishing for its commitment to Miltonic liberty as the core of the poet's civilizing art: "The source of liberty is revelation" (p. 99). What moves Frye about Milton, above all else, is the poet's failed political activism on behalf of the republican government, leading to Milton's memorable formulation of the "paradise within, happier far." In Frye's resounding formulation: "What Milton means by revelation is a consolidated, coherent, encyclopaedic view of human life which defines, among other things, the function of poetry. Every act of the free intelligence, including the poetic intelligence, is an attempt to return to Eden, a world in the human form of a garden, where we may wander as we please but cannot lose our way" (p. 55).
Michael Lieb's Theological Milton: Deity, Discourse, and Heresy in the Miltonic Canon is another learned, useful, and original study, whose title is not the only one this year to conceal its commitment to the literary. Tracing his topic to C. A. Patrides, Lieb is intent to present a "theological Milton," not just in Paradise Lost but also in De Doctrina Christiana: "Theological Milton" presents a deity who is "profoundly rooted ... in ... contentions," so that "the agonistic Milton" produces "the agonistic God." Such a "dark" view counters "Milton's reputation as the consummate poet of reason and logic" (p. 5). Lieb divides his study into three parts. The first explores De Doctrina, which provides a "context" for Milton's poetry by emphasizing the ontological, epistemological, and phenomenological modes of discourse. The second part examines both Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes, locating the theology of the deity from the treatise in major poetic works. And the third part studies "the relationship between Fathers and Sons" with respect to the "heresies" of Milton's Socinianism and Arianism (p. 10).
Missing in Lieb's title is an idea that he foregrounds to strong effect: Milton relies on "poetry" as a replacement for the truth value of God. Thus, in "De Deo" from De Doctrina, when Milton gets to the "final flourish," he resorts to "poetic devices": "All that remains is poetry" (p. 115). Where God should be, poetry appears. "What all this implies, finally, is that for Milton, the culminating moment of the portrayal of God ... is one in which the deity is beheld at its most fearsome, awesome, and essentially threatening as a mode of representation" (p. 120). When examining Paradise Lost, Lieb introduces two other important ideas. First, pace Stanley Fish and others on Milton's God as a rational being (p. 152), Lieb argues that Milton's God is "a fully passible being," an emotional God, a "sublimely feeling ... passionate deity" (p. 162). Second, pace John Shawcross and others, Milton's God is not a God of love but a God of hatred, even though "the odium Dei is always ultimately restorative" (p. 180). In Samson Agonistes, pace Mary Ann Radzinowicz, Milton produces a "theology of dread" (p. 209). In the chapters on heresy, Lieb does not see Milton as either a Socinian or an Arian but rather as engaging both. Finally, Milton's view of the godhead is singularly his own.
In Single Imperfection: Milton, Marriage, and Friendship, Thomas H. Luxon shifts from theology to sociology, crafting a superbly lucid project of considerable merit: Milton uses a classical idea of friendship to reinvent the Christian idea of marriage. Situating Milton as part of a larger humanist and reformation project that aimed to rethink Christian marriage, Milton in the divorce tracts and major poems presents marriage as a form of friendship, based on companionate mutuality. Even though Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes define Christian marriage in terms of classical friendship, marriage for Milton finally remains "an epic obstacle rather than a locus of epic return or recovery": "Milton's marriage theories finally fail to do the work he imagines for them because Milton withholds from his marriage theories the linchpin of classical and humanist friendship doctrine--equality" (p. 2; emphasis added). Thoroughly grounded in the primary philosophical texts of classicism and the primary religious texts of Christianity, Luxon presents a Milton not so much as Teskey's great poet or Lieb's learned theologian but as a social philosopher trying to solve one of the West's greatest cultural problems. Luxon tracks Milton's Christian metaphysics, indicates its limitations for us today, and offers "hope" that "someday" we can do what "Milton cannot" (p. 121). The "single imperfection" in Luxon's title is the "loneliness" Adam feels before the birth of Eve, which Milton remedies through marriage. Rather than follow the received wisdom in equating "wedded Love" with "sex," Luxon argues that Milton emphasizes spiritual conversation (p. 149). This is above all a book of ideas, told in a style as casual as it is captivating.
Like Luxon's book, Sedley's Sublimity and Skepticism in Montaigne and Milton is a great read. Lucidly cast in a genial voice, Sedley's work manages a complex comparatist and interdisciplinary project linking the French prose philosopher with the English theological poet. The core contribution is to bring together the two title topics, often kept separate. Nowhere is the power of this hermeneutic more exquisitely formulated than in the book's conclusion: "the story of skepticism, the dominant problem of modern philosophy, is also the story of sublimity, the preeminent modern aesthetic category. By recognizing that these stories must be told together, we may begin to move beyond trying to tell them apart" (p. 153; emphasis added). In particular, Sedley argues that "sublimity motivated skepticism: the sense that a force existed outside the aesthetic categories conventional in the Renaissance drove authors into a skeptical frame of mind"; and that "skepticism created sublimity: the skeptical mind-set offered alternative resources of aesthetic power and enabled authors to fashion a sublime style." These two "claims" are significant because they "revise standard views of skepticism and the sublime, suggesting a mandate for an enriched aesthetics behind late-Renaissance loss of belief and exposing the Renaissance impulse behind the modern career of sublimity," but also because the claims "contribute to ongoing discussion of the origins of modernity and genealogies of modern habits of criticism" (all, p. 8). Sedley chooses Michel de Montaigne...
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