Armstrong and Tennenhouse 1992

Armstrong, Nancy and Leonard Tennenhouse. The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, and the Origins of Personal Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

Introduction: The Imaginary Puritan

Foucault's historical method, Barthes on myths

"That is to say, history by its very nature is a kind of just-so story that gives the operative categories of industrial cultures a location well in the past, thus allowing the present order of things to emerge as so many facts of human nature." (3)

"We will argue that late-seventeenth-century England saw certain changes in intellectual and artistic practice that were both startling and profound. These changes simultaneously called into being an author with a personal life and transformed irreversibly what writing was, because they changed forever what writing did and could henceforth do." (7)

"The Milton that we are after is one that indeed links a self-evident character with a cloud of associations whose principle of coherence resists analysis." (12)

"no one can really distinguish the past from what subsequent critics and historians have made of it." (14)

family as origin "of all the drives and impulses the social world either gratifies, sublimates, controls, or thwarts to the point where some kind of rebellion becomes necessary" (18)

"The quest for origins -- of self, nation, family, and language -- displaces that past with an arduous set of textualizing practices that authorize a new class of authors and readers." (19)

The Mind of Milton

"Milton provides the means of producing a continuity, precisely where historians locate a decisive political rupture within English culture." (2w8)

"a vast cultural transformation is necessary to turn a pre-Enlightenment author into one that is recognizably modern." (40)

see 41