This study examines how Milton's polemical and imaginative literature intersects with representations of English Protestant nationhood. Through detailed case studies of Milton's works, Elizabeth Sauer shows the extent to which seventeenth-century English notions of nationhood and toleration can be subjected to literary and historicist inquiry.
Paper-contestations' and Textual Communities in England challenges traditional readings of literary history and proposes a fresh approach to the politics of consensus and contestation that distinguishes current scholarly debates about this period.
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.
The multivocal reading reveals how the poems may have been circulated in order to speak to their own time and recuperated to speak to ours. Milton instructs us about dialogism, as well as about the dialectical relationship between the desire for multivocality and the ever unfulfilled need for consensus. Most importantly, he teaches us how to create a language of alternatives, and to intervene through voice in a culturally or politically censored environment.
Elizabeth Cooperman celebrates artists who have struggled with debilitating self-doubt and uncertainty, while she reflects on her own life, grappling with questions of creativity, womanhood, and motherhood.
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