Phillis Wheatley's Miltonic Poetics

"Phillis Wheatley's Miltonic poetics responds to the critical and disciplinary divisions and prejudices that have limited recognition of how Wheatley positions herself as an American Milton in the 1773 Poems. Calling for new theorization of the methods of literary history and (inter)textual analysis this volume shows how Wheatley uses Milton to develop a sublime poetics whose assertions of imaginative power and fanciful freedom both envision an ideal Anglo-American nation and resist the coercions of the English transatlantic."