Ferguson and Nyquist 1988

process of refiguring Milton, making him "live" again; "it assumes, in other words, that certain forms of figurative dismemberment or dispersal have always already taken place; that the figure of Milton the author is itself the product of a certain self-construction; and that signs of motivated self-constitution can be seen even more clearly in the various critical and cultural traditions in which Milton enjoys an afterlife." (xii)

"Milton's self-authorship both participates in his political and religious radicalism and reveals features of an emerging bourgeois class-consciousness in ways that have yet to be fully explored. The distinctiveness of Milton's self-presentations, however, is complexly and problematically interrelated with the numerous representations of him to be found throughout the last three centuries.' (xiii)

"Perhaps especially in North America, so much writing on Milton has become so narrowly professionalized that the very weight of its authority tends to crush any efforts not appearing to conform to its standards."n -- also often "neo-Christian" or "neo-theological" or "logocentric" (xv)