My newest book, The Humanist (Re)Turn: Reclaiming the Self in Literature (Routledge, forthcoming 2019), argues for a renewed emphasis on humanism—against “the anti-humanism” of the last several decades of literary/theoretical scholarship, from the decentering of the author in Mallarmé, Barthes, and Foucault, to the fragmented—even disappearing—subject of Frederic Jameson, to the “posthuman” perspectives of critics like Donna Haraway, Richard Grusin, Rosa Braidotti, and others whose work emphasizes the decentering of the human in favor of a turn toward the nonhuman, whether understood in terms of animals, affectivity, bodies, organic and geophysical systems, materiality, or technology. It takes as its frame the idea of transcendence, specifically in terms of what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin calls a retournement dans l'Autre [return (in)to the Other], and what Carl Jung refers to as individuation. In each case, the dynamic is a turn toward the Other (without or within).
My previous book project, Love and its Critics (Cambridge: Open Book, 2017), written with Arpi Movsesian, is a history of love and the challenge love offers to the laws and customs of its times and places, as told through poetry from the Song of Songs to Ovid and Virgil, the Greek writers Longus and Musaeus, the Occitanian troubadours, the Italian poets of the thirteenth- and fourteenth-centuries, the poems and plays of Shakespeare, the poems of John Donne and Robert Herrick, and John Milton’s Paradise Lost. It is also an account of the critical reception afforded to such literature, and the ways in which criticism has attempted to stifle this challenge.
The book argues that the poetry it explores celebrates and reinvents the love the troubadour poets of the eleventh and twelfth centuries called fin’amor: love as an end in itself, mutual and freely chosen even in the face of social, religious, or political retribution. Neither eros nor agape, neither exclusively of the body, nor solely of the spirit, this love is a middle path. Alongside this tradition has grown a critical movement that employs a 'hermeneutics of suspicion', in Paul Ricoeur’s phrase, to claim that passionate love poetry is not what it seems, and should be properly understood as worship of God, subordination to Empire, or an entanglement with the structures of language itself – in short, the very things it resists.
My previous book (Ashgate, 2012/Routledge 2016) is The Atheist Milton. But in calling the book The Atheist Milton, and in arguing that Milton was an atheist then, and would be an atheist were he alive today, I am trying to make a fairly nuanced case, despite the deliberate provocation of the title.
“Atheism” meant different things in Milton’s day than it does for us today. Essentially, the word has become narrower in scope for us, less flexible in its capacity to carry shades of meaning. “Atheist” tends to mean one thing today: someone who does not believe in God. In Milton’s time, the term “Atheist” was used in a much more wide-ranging way: it could refer to someone who did not believe that God existed, but more commonly it referred, not to unbelief, but to variations in belief that were regarded by the accuser (and the word is almost always an accusation rather than a self-chosen label) as straying from orthodox belief, what I refer to in the book (with all due irony) as correct belief as opposed to the incorrect belief of the “atheist.”
My argument is two-fold: based on his association with Arian ideas (denial of the doctrine of the Trinity), his argument for the de Deo theory of creation (the idea that the universe is created, not from nothing or ex nihilo, but from the essence of God, which puts him in line with the materialism of Spinoza and Hobbes), and his Mortalist argument that the human soul dies with the human body, Milton was an Atheist by the commonly-used definitions of the period. And as the poet who takes a reader from the presence of an imperious, monarchical God in Paradise Lost, to the internal—almost Gnostic—conception of God in Paradise Regained, to the absence of any God whatsoever in Samson Agonistes, Milton is the poet of the Atheists, pushing harder against that old “task-Master” than any poet before or since.
My research and teaching often focuses on questions of authority and its construction. I have special interest in how those questions and constructions are manifested in the early modern era, but my interest (even passion) transcends period. My first book, The Tyranny of Heaven: Milton’s Rejection of God as King (U. Delaware Press, 2004), focuses this interest on John Milton and the English 17th century, a place and time in which questions of freedom and authority eventually brought a nation to revolution, civil war, and a failed attempt to permanently overthrow a centuries-old tradition of monarchical government.
