Culture and Society in the Stuart Restoration
Literature, Drama, History

Literary and cultural changes reflecting new commercial and imperial interests of Restoration Britain.

Gerald MacLean (Edited by)

9780521475662, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 27 April 1995

312 pages, 1 b/w illus.
22.8 x 15.4 x 1.8 cm, 0.456 kg

"This entertaining collection of essays accomplishes two significant feats: it offers a strong set of individual pieces on particular late seventeenth-century writers that, when read together, invite one to speculate more generally on the ways in which 'the restoration' has been delineated and investigated by different academic disciplines....Culture and Society in the Stuart Restoration handsomely delivers on its openeing promise to cause us to think more deeply about the ways in which individuals respond to dramatic national changes and the ways we study them." Margaret J. M. Ezell, Modern Philology

What specifically distinguishes Restoration culture and society from what went before and came after? And how did early modern British women and men accommodate themselves to the dramatic historical changes of the seventeenth century? This study, which brings together recent work by leading historians as well as literary and cultural critics of the period, shows how the Restoration produced the concept of a national literature crucial to a new nationalist cultural enterprise: questions of national identity and difference, of what it meant to be English or British or both, came to be framed in terms of international trade and imperial ambition; and religious and royal authority gave way before the advance of a secular literary culture geared to the demands of a developing commercial and imperial nation.

Introduction
1. Literature, culture, and society in Restoration England Gerald MacLean
Part I. Drama and Politics: 2. The quest for consensus the lord mayor's shows in the 1670s John Patrick Montano
3. Politics and the restoration masque the case of Dido and Aeneas Andrew Walkling
4. Factionary politics John Crowne's Henry VI Nancy Klein Maguire
Part II. Authorship and Authority: 5. Pepys and the private parts of monarchy James Grantham Turner
6. Milton, Samson Agonistes, and the Restoration Blair Worden
7. Milton, Dryden, and the politics of literary controversy Steven N. Zwicker
8. 'Is he like other men?' The meaning of the Principia Mathematica, and the author as idol Robert Iliffe
Part III. Women and Writing: 9. A woman's best setting out is silence: the writings of Hannah Wolley Elaine Hobby
10. Obedient subjects? The loyal self in some later seventeenth-century women's memoirs N. H. Keeble
Part IV. Empire and Aftermaths: 11. Seventeenth-century Quaker women: displacement, colonialism, and anti-slavery discourse Moira Ferguson
12. Republicanism, absolutism and universal monarchy: English popular sentiment during the third Dutch war Steven C. A. Pincus
13. Reinterpreting the 'glorious revolution': Catharine Macaulay and radical response Bridget Hill.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD]