Introduction: Milton's Pan-American Life and Afterlife

Abstract

In an investigation of the nineteenth century appropriation of Shakespeare for the causes and values of U.S. nationhood, including its staunch anti-Englishness, Kim Sturgess points out that the English playwright’s works “were embraced by citizens throughout the United States and the stories contained within the plays are today accepted as part of American cultural heritage.”1 A few years later, Nigel Smith made a shrewd and controversial case for Milton speaking through his polemical and visionary writings, more powerfully than even Shakespeare to “Anglo-Americans” across the political and cultural spectrum about the terms of liberty.2 The present collection of original essays takes up this argument and explores it further in the new terrains mapped by critics from across the Americas. But Milton in the Americas also includes a number of the essays that could be designated as revisionist insofar as they register what some of Milton’s readers see as the English poet-polemicist’s un-Americanness.