ABSTRACT
A very influential claim of postmodern literary theory has been that texts are constructed by societies and readers, as much as they are by individual authors. This claim, however, has had little effect on Milton studies.1 Miltonists today are profoundly committed to their eponymous author, treating his life and times as a necessary adjunct of his work.2 Psychoanalytic studies remain prominent in the field, along with less technical psychobiographies.3 Skinnerian analyses of the poet’s politics, in recent years a dominant critical strain, routinely pass from discussing his texts to reconstructing his thoughts.4 Finally, work on the Miltonic “self,” though postmodernistically dressed, is basically the post-postmodern re-emergence of traditional biographic criticism.5
