Barbarous Dissonance and Images of Voice in Milton's Epics

Front Cover
McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP, 1996 - Language Arts & Disciplines - 213 pages
Elizabeth Sauer brings a new perspective to Milton scholarship through her examination of the relative status and authority of the multiple narrative voices in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. She argues that Milton's epics accommodate a variety of interpretive voices, episodes, and dramatic and discursive exchanges that resist the monological containment of the poems' dominant narratives. Sauer investigates the texts' discursive practices and the politics of their orchestration of voice, exploring the ways in which Milton's multivocal poems interrogated dominant structures of authority in the seventeenth century and constructed in their place a community of voices characterized by dissonances. She incorporates different critical responses to Milton's texts into her argument as a way of contextualizing her own historically engaged approach. By injecting concepts such as multiple narrators and genres, open forms, strategic deferrals, and the exchanges between the poetic voices and discourses of the early modern period, Sauer tells us something about how the poems spoke to their own time as well as how they may be recuperated to speak to ours.

From inside the book

Contents

The Voices and Politics of Nimrod
14
Critical Interventions
39
Task of Raphael Satan and the PoetNarrator
62
The Gendered Hierarchy of Discourse
87
Colonialism and Censorship
111
The Voices of Nebuchadnezzar in Paradise Regained
136
Works Cited
191
Index
209
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Bibliographic information