Elizabeth Hodgson is Professor of English literature at the University of British Columbia. She has published Gender and the Sacred Self in John Donne (1999), Grief and Women Writers in the English Renaissance (2015) and many articles and book chapters on English Renaissance literary cultures.
'In this thoughtful and sophisticated book, Hodgson demonstrates the extent to which the tensions of early modern masculinity animate and complicate John Milton's poems and prose works. Making surprising and revelatory connections across the full range of Milton's writings, this is a timely and generative piece of scholarship.' Joseph Moshenska, University of Oxford 'The Masculinities of John Milton by Elizabeth M. A. Hodgson is a necessary and convincingly feminist account of the making of masculinity in Milton's works. Earlier feminist approaches to Milton have often focused on femininity and the representation of women; masculinity is so ubiquitous that it has remained an unmarked and underexamined term. This book, therefore, offers an essential intervention in Milton studies by exploring how Milton's portrayal of citizenship, freedom, friendship, love, and marriage depend upon cultural constructions of masculinity.' Lara Dodds, Mississippi State University 'Elizabeth Hodgson has produced a highly sophisticated and challenging study of Milton's 'masculinities,' his diverse yet nevertheless similar approaches to manhood.' Catherine Gimelli Martin, Modern Philology '… convincingly demonstrates once again how gender shapes the social and political realities of early modernity.' Ben Labreche, Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal