John Milton and the English Revolution: A Study in the Sociology of Literature
Macmillan, London, vii + 248 pp., 1981
The problem of the relationship between the writer and society has figured prominently in the debates of both western European marxism and western European academic sociology. The work which has been done during the past few years in the English-speaking world, however, has tended to remain at the level of general theory. Dr Milner's book represents an attempt to apply that emerging body of theory to the study of something very specific - the political, philosophical, and poetical writings of John Milton, the great poet of the seventeenth-century English revolution.
The book begins with a critical discussion of the literary theories of Marx, Engels, Lukcs, Goldmann, Sartre, Brecht, Eliot, Leavis, and others. Dr Milner argues within an overall Marxist framework for a modified version of Lucien Goldmann's 'genetic structuralism'. Suggesting that the English revolution was indeed, in the classical Marxist sense, a 'bourgeois revolution', he seeks to demonstrate that the revolutionary Independents were the revolutionary party of the English bourgeoisie. Utilising Goldmann's sociological method, Dr Milner argues that the seventeenth-century revolutionary crisis witnessed the creation and subsequent destruction of a rationalist world vision, a world vision which found political expression in the political practice of the Independent party. He uses this model of the rationalist world vision to explain the underlying structural categories of Milton's work of the pre-revolutionary and revolutionary periods.
A detailed analysis of Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes seeks to explain the nature of that reorganisation of those central rationalist categories which was imposed upon the ex-Independents by the Restoration in 1660. Each of the three poems is seen as taking as its central object the problem of defeat, whether potential or actual, and as articulating distinct and separate responses to the triumph of unreason over reason. Dr Milner shows that the shifts in emphasis between the three poems can be related to the changing fortunes of the revolutionary opposition.
'a carefully conceived and justified study of ... Milton's philosophy, beliefs and values ... and their influence on and expression through his works''clearly-defined and thought-provoking insights into Milton as thinker and revolutionary' - Robin Robbins, Times Literary Supplement)
'a book which everyone interested in Milton .. should read ... Milner has made a very signicant contribution to our understanding of that complex figure'- Christopher Hill, Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, Literature and History
'argued with great clarity and conviction, and considerable persuasiveness'- William Zunder, Fellow in English, University of Hull