John Leonard. Faithful Labourers: A Reception History of Paradise Lost, 1667-1970

John Leonard. Faithful Labourers: A Reception History of Paradise Lost, 1667-1970. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. 853 pp. ISBN: 9780199681808 and 9780199681815 John Leonard has written a reception history of Paradise Lost that offers a view of Milton aligned with a body of criticism that reached its apogee after the middle of the last century. A specifically Canadian context makes its presence felt in several ways, most obviously in Leonard's faithful and laborious research in the University of Western Ontario's G. William Stuart, Jr., Collection of Milton and Miltoniana, the basic archive that supports his project, and in his taking A. S. P. Woodhouse and Douglas Bush's volume of the Variorum Commentary of the Poems of John Milton as a model (viii). We find other traces of the kind of humanism that underwrote Canadian scholarship on Milton after World War II--an approach that valorized liberalism, historicism, Protestantism, formalism, and that mounted a defence of Milton from Eliotean disparagement (see Feisal G. Mohamed's and Mary Nyquist's introduction to Milton and Questions of History, xviii). critical thinking behind this distinguished scholarship owes a debt to a tradition of Milton criticism that goes back to Samuel Johnson, if not further. Leonard himself follows a line of criticism that culminates in Christopher Ricks's Milton's Grand Style (1963), which makes an appreciation of Milton's epic style central to a reading of the poem. Formalist concerns stretch out over five initial chapters, occupying an entire volume of almost 400 pages (Style and Genre), while a second volume accounts for Interpretative Issues, a rubric under which Leonard includes six broad categories: Satan, God, Innocence, The Fall, Sex and the Sexes, and The Universe. emphasis thus falls on theology in the first four of these chapters and on intellectual history in the last. volumes serve very usefully as a reference tool, combining features of variorum commentary, annotated bibliography, and literary analysis, but together also form a free-standing work of criticism. danger of such a compilation is the risk of losing readers in the thickets of erudition surrounding Milton, and Leonard has not entirely avoided the problem of distilling a small library of writing into monographic form. Even so, Miltonists will find the two volumes indispensable to the work of reconstructing the critical history of the poem. Since 1970 serves as the study's terminus ad quern, the impact of feminism on the academy (or of the theory boom in general, for that matter) does not make its presence felt to any extent, although Leonard sometimes discusses books published after this date. He has provided a detailed guide to the state of play familiar, in its broad outlines, to the generation of undergraduates born in the 1950s. This book preserves in amber the state of Milton studies current in universities throughout the Anglophone world before the rise of theory and in the wake of F. R. Leavis's critique of Milton. This historical encounter with the poem derives from a scholarly reconstruction rooted in two outstanding student editions--one by A. W. Verity (1910) and the other by Alastair Fowler (1968)--and especially in critical contributions by William Empson, Eliot, Leavis, and above all Ricks, who once and for all routed the Leavisites, in Christopher Hill's martial phrase (251). In the first three chapters, these and related twentieth-century controversies get rehearsed, and most of the relevant texts re-read with a discerning eye. In the 1970s, knowledge of Milton's early reception remained a topic closed to all but a few specialists, with some part of it generally available in John T. Shawcross's Milton, 1732-1801: Critical Heritage. More recent work has filled in holes, notably Paradise Lost, 1668-1968: Three Centuries of Commentary, edited by Earl Miner, William Moeck, and Steven Jablonski. …