Altering Eyes: New Perspectives on Samson Agonistes

The essays in this volume bring under scrutiny traditional interpretations of what is widely considered Milton's last poem. As such the essays in Altering Eyes are an imitation of the writings they would illuminate, which is to say that they are "methodologically adventurous, " not merely "assimilative, " and will do the kind of work that much Milton criticism of recent decades has resisted. Evident in all these essays is a deep alliance, an interdependency between history, literature, and theory. Here philosophy and psychology, international law, economics, ethics, legal theory, aesthetics and biblical hermeneutics, the laws of genre and generic transformations, republican politics, comparative religion all come into play. Because of the paths they pursue and the critical methodologies they deploy, these eleven essays revise not only past criticism but also one another with the title of this volume, Altering Eyes, in its invocation of Blake's wise injunction that the eye altering alters all, serving as their intellectual and methodological, paradigm.