Richard Bradford, author of this Guide and co‐editor of the series of which it is a part, notes that each volume in the series “offers the reader a comprehensive account of the featured author’s life, or his or her writing and of the ways in which his or her works have been interpreted by literary critics”. Each of the books, including this one, follows a similar tripartite pattern: Part I presents the featured author’s “Life and Contexts”. Part II focuses on his or her most important works, discussed from a literary‐historical perspective, and Part III offers an account of the critical responses generated by that author’s work. The series’ rather high reaching goal is “to equip you [the reader] with all the knowledge you need to make your own new readings of crucial literary texts”.
In this particular volume, Bradford works dextrously back and forth in situating Milton’s life and works within the framework of seventeenth‐century socio‐political history and religious controversy. Thus Part I explores chronologically Milton’s life in the context of post‐Reformation Anglican and Puritanism developments, the English Civil War (prior, during, after) and Continental responses to it, and the intellectual movements to which Milton responded as well as contributed. In detailing that life, Bradford notes briefly the particular poetry or prose Milton created at that time, suggesting that the literary output, both fiction and non‐fiction, resulted from Milton’s responses to specific conditions, situations and events. The emphasis in Part I is on the prose works and pamphlets, most of which were produced during the 1640s and 1650s.
Part II treats Milton’s English Poetry, using the chronology developed (1968) by Carey and Fowler (the non‐English poems are referred to in Part I). The poems are dealt with as “Early Poems”, “Political Poems”, “Tragic and Epic Poetry” (Samson Agonistes, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained). Each “analysis” provides some background information, some commentary, and occasionally some notes to connect one work with another. Bradford frequently links the so‐called “minor” poetry with Paradise Lost. Just as frequently, and somewhat disconcertingly, he inserts opinions that distract from otherwise objective examination, such as when he says of Sonnet IX that “its closing lines, at least for many modern readers, are nauseating”, or that the “Piedmont” sonnet “comes very close to the appropriation of an act of genocide as shamelessly political rhetoric”.
The ambitious last part of the book provides a guide through three hundred years of Milton criticism and offers Bradford’s comments on “why critical disagreements have arisen and how a critic’s political‐cultural affiliations and circumstances can affect [his or her] perspectives and opinions”. As in the previous parts of the book, Bradford proceeds chronologically through the materials, dealing first with the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries, the Romantics, the Victorian critics, and Modern critics; this last section is subdivided into sections on “Lewis, Empson and the pre‐theory critics”, “Feminist criticism”, “History and politics”, Psychoanalysis”, and “Poststructuralism and deconstruction”. This part concludes with a list of further readings that variously extend aspects of the critical fields dealt with above, or that (somewhat confusingly) “provide detailed accounts of contextual and peripheral issues, and offer introductory guides”. Among the topics dealt with are “Theology and religion”, “Style and form”, “Context and politics”, and “Student‐targeted surveys, reference books and collections”. A summarised chronology of Milton’s life, a Bibliography of over 125 related works, and a detailed, useful index conclude the book.
Bradford’s Complete Critical Guide to John Milton will be useful to undergraduate and graduate students new to a study of Milton, and especially so for any readers who wish to explore a writer within his or her historical setting. Despite the minor objections noted above, this is a readable, useful, often‐insightful Guide that will be well received by students and many teachers.
