Milton's Spenser The Politics of Reading

"Maureen Quilligan here examines Spenser's Faerie Queene and Milton's Paradise Lost in an attempt to define the means by which they move their readers, through the power of language, to make ethical and political choices. Quilligan addresses questions that deepen our understanding of the social instrumentality of these epic poems: How do the writers make rhetorical appeals to their readers? How can the reader's interpreting presence be detected in the text? How do Spenser and Milton address arguments to readers specifically in terms of their gender? Asserting that Milton and Spenser were extraordinarily sensitive to the presence of the reader in their construction of narrative, Quilligan looks closely at Milton's appropriation of Spenser's techniques for implicating the reader's self-consciousness in the interpretation of the text. She demonstrates that both Milton and Spenser address specific political arguments to an identifiably female reader, and elevate sexual intimacy to the status of an epic subject"--Jacket.