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

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.

• Intensive, wide-ranging, and up-to-date work by leading scholars on previously neglected period in British history • Interdisciplinary approach, reflecting historical, social, and cultural interest in the late seventeenth century • Particular emphasis on women as writers and historical agents in early modern Britain

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.