Feisal Mohamed and Mary Nyquist have assembled a remarkable collection of eighteen essays and an afterword from Canadian Miltonists past and present, a juxtaposition that raises vital questions about critical historiography. What constitutes the past for this collection are Great Generation Miltonists — those who wrote during the Second World War and postwar period — with a strong sense of national identity and a keen interest in political freedom, both reflected in their evaluations of Milton. The collection thus begins with seven essays from 1938 to 1962 and then skips a generation or two of scholarship to present both backward- and forward-looking essays by the scholarly children and grandchildren of this generation of professors. Two of these — Hugh MacCallum and Balachandra Rajan — lived just long enough to contribute both past essays and new reflections to the volume.

After a rich introduction, the volume begins with a lecture by Douglas Bush confronting the views of the early twentieth century, in which F. R. Leavis, backed by the heavy but less certain guns of T. S. Eliot, confidently announced “Milton’s dislodgment.” Although Eliot would later speak of Milton as one of England’s two greatest poets, he did “more than any other individual to turn a generation away from Milton” (18), and (as Bush suggests), precisely at the moment when the world needed Milton’s ethics and politics. The liberal urgency behind Bush’s recovery project also drove a strong contextualist strain of Milton criticism. A. S. P. Woodhouse’s writing, excerpted here from the 1938 volume Puritanism and Liberty, explains the complexities of the army debates of 1647–49 and emphasizes the tensions between “revolutionary ideals” and the “demands of actual life” (24). This contextualist approach to the history of ideas is followed later in this section by the work of students and colleagues during Woodhouse’s tenure at Toronto, particularly Ernest Sirluck, whose influential edition of Areopagitica typified the larger project of contextualizing Milton in the multivolume Yale edition of the Complete Prose Works. Included here is a lesser-known essay of Sirluck’s on the importance of the licensing controversy — an issue that has returned only recently to the foreground in readings of Areopagitica. Another student of Woodhouse, Arthur Barker, whose Milton and the Puritan Dilemma (1942) was one of the last century’s most important works on Milton’s prose, has an essay in this collection on eighteenth-century interpretations of Paradise Lost.

If these last two selections seem less representative, the selections from Balachandra Rajan, Hugh MacCallum, and Northrop Frye show these scholars nearer their best. The piece from Rajan is a superb excerpt from his pioneering work in the history of reading, “Paradise Lost” and the Seventeenth Century Reader, especially useful for assigning in coursework. But if a prize could be given for past essays, it would undoubtedly go to MacCallum for a learned essay on Milton and figurative interpretation of the Bible, indeed one of the finest in the history of Milton scholarship. Frye’s lecture for the Comparative Literature Association understands Lycidas as an “archetype” for Edward King, and explains how literary archetypes worked in early modern literary contexts. The phrase “literature as context” in Frye’s title may be misleading; his is in fact the only nonhistoricist essay in this section. For Frye, “the forms of literature are autonomous: that is, they do not exist outside literature” (55). Yet the editors’ description of this as a “New Critical tenet” (xix) may confuse readers as to Frye’s complex regard for historical criticism. In the famous MLA debate between A. S. P. Woodhouse and Cleanth Brooks, Frye sides with his Canadian colleague, treating the new school of criticism with bemused suspicion many years after it was actually new: “Woodhouse has been asked to do a Milton Paper at M.L.A. & his opposite number is Cleanth Brooks, who apparently belongs to a group called the ‘New Critics’ who are supposed to ignore historical criticism & concentrate on texture, whatever texture is” (Frye, Diary, 14 March 1950).

Although MacCallum’s retrospective essay serves as the single essay in a section titled “Reflection,” which bridges the past and present sections of this collection, several others scattered among the “present” essays serve this same end. John Leonard meditates on the legacy of Douglas Bush, particularly with regard to his extraordinary but sometimes limited attention to allusions. Elizabeth Sauer undertakes a thorough examination of the role of Woodhouse’s Puritanism and Liberty in subsequent scholarly history. Peter Herman looks back on Frye’s efforts to make criticism a “science” through the cultural prism of the erosion of support for the humanities during the Cold War, and sees in Frye a “fundamentally riven” (285) sense of Canadian cultural identity that drives the dialectical and sometimes paradoxical energies of his scholarship. Each of these essays looks back with useful specificity on the work represented in the first part of the volume.

The six remaining new essays serve various functions, but most of these also have a retrospective component. With reference to Canadian Miltonists Sirluck and Watson Kirkconnell, Nicholas von Maltzahn asks whether Milton really fits in the liberal “narrative of emancipation” (215) by looking at deist appropriations of Milton in the late seventeenth century. Annabel Patterson analyzes the two versions of The Readie and Easie Way to show how the blind writer painstakingly revised his proposals toward a more progressive and more secular form of government than has been allowed. Feisal Mohamed’s sharp essay on Fielding, Jonson, and mimesis in Paradise Lost attempts to recover the ironic and satiric in Milton from what he sees as “the high mimetic realm of epic and tragedy” (292) that Milton has inhabited, thanks to Frye and others. Elizabeth Hodgson explores “how and why ‘Protestant’ texts invoke such Catholic images” (314) as the nun in Il Penseroso or the cloister in Areopagitica. In a suggestive analysis of Areopagitica that recovers its Machiavellian notions of history, Phillip Donnelly contrasts what he sees as Milton’s “story of Scripture” (328) with Machiavellian historical analysis. Muhammad Sid-Ahmad explores the possible influence of a twelfth-century Arabic text, Hayy bin Yaqzan, on book 8 of Paradise Lost. And, in a stunning piece of ecocriticism, Balachandra Rajan undertakes an analysis of Milton’s Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle and Paradise Lost concerned with “the consequences of installing human dominance over the lesser creation” (387). Paul Stevens finishes the volume with a highly coherent afterword.

If I have any concern about this excellent juxtaposition of past and present essays, it would be only that the less knowing reader might remain ignorant of the extraordinary middle generations — those who wrote in the five decades between 1962 and now — whose writings remain unrepresented in the volume. Perhaps the most worrying omission — not, of course, intended — is the great feminist scholarship (such as that of Nyquist herself), which arose from the same scholarly legacy, and which seems too much in danger of being forgotten.