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Reading literary texts in their historical contexts has been the dominant form of interpretation in literary criticism for the past thirty years. This collection of essays reflects on the origins of historicism and its present usefulness as a mode of literary analysis, its limitations, and its future. The volume provides a brief history of the practice from its renaissance origins, offering examples of historicist work that not only demonstrate the continuing vitality of this methodology but also suggest new directions for research. Focusing on the major figures of Shakespeare and Milton,...

Milton criticism often treats the poet as if he were the last of the Renaissance poets or a visionary prophet who remained misunderstood until he was read by the Romantics. At the same time, literary histories of the period often invoke a "long eighteenth century" that reaches its climax with the French Revolution or the Reform Bill of 1832. What gets overlooked in such accounts is the rich story of Milton's relationship to his contemporaries and early eighteenth-century heirs. The essays in this collection demonstrate that some of Milton's earliest readers were more perceptive than Romantic...