Dominion undeserved: The critique of nation and empire in Milton's later work

We know John Milton as an ardent patriot who put his poetic vocation on hold to participate in the revolutionary politics of the mid-seventeenth century. His writings often express a conviction that England had been divinely chosen to pave the way for religious and political freedom. At the same time, Milton's writings reveal an intellectual curiosity and a poetic imagination that are capaciously international in scope. Book XI of Paradise Lost alone directs the readers' attention to such far-flung places as China, Congo, Rome, Mexico, Peru, and Guiana. This project attends to the interpretive difficulties posed by Milton's Anglocentrism on the one hand and the global outlook of his writings on the other. I argue that after the political and personal calamity of the Restoration, Milton's writings advance critiques of English nationhood and its expansionist projects. These works describe nation and empire as inseparable but contradictory: the project of nation-building relies upon imperialist forms of domination and control, but the result, inevitably, is a fractured polity. Mercantilist or colonialist efforts to consolidate national power merely replicate internal crises.; Of particular concern is the way in which literary, political, and theological concerns converge (often in dynamic or volatile ways) in Milton's poetry and prose. The chapters dealing with Paradise Lost, for example, trace the ways in which Milton's Genesis narrative critically re-imagines colonialist discourses and travel narratives by writers such as William of Rubruck, Walter Raleigh, and Giles Fletcher; the country-house poetry of Aemilia Lanyer, Ben Jonson, Robert Herrick, and Andrew Marvell; and such early modern epics of empire as Luis de Camoes's The Lusiads and Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene. As my brief epilogue about the eighteenth-century writer Olaudah Equiano underscores, my project uncovers ways in which Milton's later poetry and prose intervene in the historical discourses (and counter-discourses) of nation and nascent empire, exerting political and cultural force through literary history.