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Author Biography

Kate Ozment, PhD, is head of the Digital Scholarship team at Kelvin Smith Library, Case Western Reserve University, where she directs the Freedman Center for Digital Scholarship. Her research focuses on women's roles in Anglo-American print history of the long eighteenth-century and digital humanities, and she has published in Huntington Library Quarterly, Eighteenth-Century Studies, and Digital Humanities Quarterly. She teaches broadly as a generalist interested in English-language literature by women and gender minorities, feminist theory, and the interplay of the digital and the material text.

Abstract

This article discusses a senior-level literature course that puts into dialogue Phillis Wheatley Peters and John Milton. Wheatley Peters’ poetry on tyranny and freedom during the American Revolution, especially “America,” is compared to Milton’s Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, Areopagitica, and Paradise Lost, which explore the same themes during the English Civil War. Students trace how Milton’s transformative but narrowed ideas of freedom for enfranchised subjects in England are powerfully reimagined by Wheatley Peters in double meanings of freedom for the colonies and enslaved subjects. Secondary sources allow students to engage in the canon-building of Milton as he transformed from imprisoned heretic to national poet. The Wheatley Peters unit ended by connecting canon-building discussions to the soft power of English nationalism and Audre Lorde’s construction of the “master’s discourse.” I conclude that this pairing is particularly fruitful for Miltonists looking to comparatively explore the far-reaching impact of his life and work and Wheatley Peters scholars who want to connect her to a radical political history and allegorical poetics.

Keywords

pedagogy; political writing; feminist theory; American literature; British literature

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