Sauer investigates the texts' discursive practices and the politics of their orchestration of voice exploring the ways in which Milton's multivocal poems interrogated dominant structures of authority in the seventeenth century and constructed in their place a community of voices characterized by dissonances. She incorporates different critical responses to Milton's texts into her argument as a way of contextualizing her own historically engaged approach. By injecting concepts such as multiple narrators and genres, open forms, strategic deferrals, and the exchanges between the poetic voices and discourses of the early modern period, Sauer tells us something about how the poems spoke to their own time as well as how they may be recuperated to speak to ours.

Elizabeth Sauer is a professor in the Department of English at Brock University.

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"Barbarous Dissonance and Images of Voice in Milton's Epics is a serious advance in research in the field of Milton studies. I am impressed by Sauer's wide learning in the period, by her feel for the most subtle pressures exerted by history in Milton's poems, and by her ability to put this talent to work in explicating the poems in truly original ways. This book does more than say new things about Milton; it develops new methods for saying those things." Gordon Teskey, Department of English, Cornell University. "With keen insight and subtle observation Sauer brings Milton within the orbit of postmodern discourse and makes a major contribution to efforts to theorize Milton's writings. Barbarous Dissonance and Images of Voice in Milton's Epics is impressive both in its theoretical orientation and in the range of its interests. Not just Miltonists but all students of the Renaissance and narrative art, as well as most theorists will be both drawn to and compelled by this book." Joseph Wittreich, Graduate Center, City University of New York.