Imperfect Sense: The Predicament of Milton's Irony Hardback - 2001

"This is a deeply intelligent and philosophically sophisticated meditation on the crucial issues in Milton's poetry and their relationship to the crucial issues of Western thought. I was struck by its power and radical intelligence. The book will have an immediate and significant impact."--Stanley Fish, University of Illinois at Chicago

"This is a truly wonderful book. It will establish Silver as a leading Miltonist. She writes with extraordinary grace and power, and has a remarkable stylistic gift. The turn of her sentences and the shape of her paragraphs have a kind of Mozartian musicality that has charmed me and will charm other readers. The subject of her book is a disturbing and to some degree iconoclastic one. This is a big book in every way, and gives us a new Milton."--J. Hillis Miller, University of California, Irvine

"Victoria Silver's book has an inclusiveness that I find comparable to Milton's own. With a clarity that is uncanny given the range of materials she brings into play and keeps there, she holds Milton's enterprise in front of her reader by appealing continuingly to an array of coordinates. As she applies to Milton's interests her readings of works by a much larger cast, she is invariably provocative and to the point. Her book unfolds seamlessly whatever writer it is she is addressing. Silver is someone who knows how to write a completely engaging book about everything under the sun. As each of the best books is, hers is one of a kind."--James McMichael, author of The World at Large, New and Selected Poems, 1971-1996

"Silver's book is a seminal study that significantly revises our understanding of the topics that it pursues, each topic having been and continuing to be a major focus of scholarly and critical commentary on Milton. It is also a study in the history of ideas. Expansive in its interpretation of Milton's irony, it achieves a synergy that more monocular studies lack."--Albert C. Labriola, Duquesne University