Volume 49, Number 12 · July 18, 2002
Did Milton Go to the Devil's Party?
By John K. Leonard
How Milton Works
by Stanley Fish
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 616 pp., $35.00
How Milton Works by Stanley Fish was a much-anticipated academic event. A distinguished scholar of seventeenth-century literature and a controversial literary theorist, Fish is now a dean at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Surprised by Sin, his first book on Milton, published in 1967, is widely and justifiably regarded as one of the most influential studies of Paradise Lost to appear in the last century. The recent How Milton Works is really a collection of separate essays, written at different times, and aimed at different audiences, during Fish's long and contentious career. Even though ten of fifteen chapters were published previously, some more than thirty years ago, Fish has written five new chapters, an introduction, and an epilogue. There is more than enough fresh material here (over 250 pages out of a total of 616) to suggest development of Fish's views on Milton.
Review, 4414 words
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