Milton’s paradise lost and a postcolonial fall

Abstract

In John Milton’s Paradise Lost epic and empire are dissociated. Contrary to many misreadings, this all-important work of the English Renaissance intersects postcolonial thinking in a number of ways. By using Gayatri Spivak’s circuit of postcolonial theory and practice, this paper enacts a counterpointal (mis)reading of Milton’s text: Paradise Lost may at last free its (post-)colonial (dis)content. Since every reading is a misreading, my (mis)reading of Milton’s paradise is a
mo(ve)ment of resistance against and intervention in a so-called grand narrative of power (Milton’s epic) with a view to proposing a postcolonial conversation with this text.