Barbarous Dissonance and Images of Voice in Milton's Epics

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McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP, Aug 27, 1996 - Literary Criticism - 224 pages
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.

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Contents

Introduction
3
1 The Voices and Politics of Nimrod
14
2 Critical Interventions
35
The Sad Task of Raphael Satan and the PoetNarrator
62
4 The Gendered Hierarchy of Discourse
87
Colonialism and Censorship in Paradise
111
6 The Voices of Nebuchadnezzar in Paradise Regained
136
Conclusion
160
Notes
163
Works Cited
191
Index
209
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Eng, Brock U

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