1. Tennenhouse, “The Case of the Resistant Captive,” South Atlantic Quarterly 95:4 (1996): 919–46;
2. Joseph Wittreich calls the poem “the major site of contestation in Milton studies,” Wittreich and Mark R. Kelley, eds., Altering Eyes: New Perspectives on Samson Agonistes (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002), 11. This “contestation” is illustrated by the essays in that volume, as well as by Wittreich’s diptych, Interpreting Samson Agonistes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), and Shifting Contexts: Reinterpreting Samson Agonistes (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2002).
3. See, for example, Mary Ann Radzinowicz Toward Samson Agonistes: The Growth of Milton’s Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), esp. 269–349;
4. David Loewenstein, Milton and the Drama of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), esp. 126–51;
5. Mchael Lieb, Milton and the Culture of Violence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), esp. 225–63.