The Masculinities of John Milton: Cultures and Constructs of Manhood in the Major Works

Description

The Masculinites of John Milton is the first published monograph on Milton's men. Examining how Milton's fantasies of manly authority are framed in his major works, this study exposes the gaps between Milton's pleas for liberty and his assumptions that White men like himself should rule his culture. From schoolboys teaching each other how to traffic in young women in the Ludlow Masque, to his treatises on divorce that make the wife-less husband the best possible citizen, and to the later epics, in which Milton wrestles with male small talk and the ladders of masculine social power, his verse and prose draw from and amplify his culture's claims about manliness in education, warfare, friendship, citizenship, and conversation. This revolutionary poet's most famous writings reveal how ambivalently manhood is constructed to serve itself in early modern England.

Elizabeth Hodgson is Professor of English literature at the University of British Columbia. She has published Gender and the Sacred Self in John Donne (1999), Grief and Women Writers in the English Renaissance (2015) and many articles and book chapters on English Renaissance literary cultures.

'In this thoughtful and sophisticated book, Hodgson demonstrates the extent to which the tensions of early modern masculinity animate and complicate John Milton's poems and prose works. Making surprising and revelatory connections across the full range of Milton's writings, this is a timely and generative piece of scholarship.' Joseph Moshenska, University of Oxford 'The Masculinities of John Milton by Elizabeth M. A. Hodgson is a necessary and convincingly feminist account of the making of masculinity in Milton's works. Earlier feminist approaches to Milton have often focused on femininity and the representation of women; masculinity is so ubiquitous that it has remained an unmarked and underexamined term. This book, therefore, offers an essential intervention in Milton studies by exploring how Milton's portrayal of citizenship, freedom, friendship, love, and marriage depend upon cultural constructions of masculinity.' Lara Dodds, Mississippi State University