RESTORATION LITERATURE IN ENGLAND

Restoration literature includes:

Paradise Lost

Locke's Treatises on Government,

the founding of the Royal Society,

the pioneering of literary criticism from Dryden, and the first newspapers.

The official break in literary culture caused by censorship and radically moralist standards under Cromwell's Puritan regime created a gap in literary tradition, allowing a seemingly fresh start for all forms of literature after the Restoration.

During the Interregnum, the royalist forces attached to the court of Charles I went into exile with the twenty-year old Charles II. The nobility who travelled with Charles II were therefore lodged for over a decade in the midst of the continent's literary scene. Charles spent his time attending plays in France, and he developed a taste for Spanish plays.

The largest and most important poetic form of the era was satire, in general, done anonymously. There were great dangers in being associated with a satire:

On the one hand, defamation law was a wide net, and it was difficult for a satirist to avoid prosecution if he were proven to have written a piece that seemed to criticize a noble.

On the other hand, wealthy individuals would respond to satire as often as not by having the suspected poet physically attacked by ruffians.

John Dryden was set upon for being merely suspected of having written the Satire on Mankind. A consequence of this anonymity is that a great many poems, some of them of merit, are unpublished and largely unknown.

Prose in the Restoration period is dominated by Christian religious writing, but the Restoration also saw the beginnings of two genres that would dominate later periods, fiction and journalism.

Religious writing often strayed into political and economic writing, just as political and economic writing implied or directly addressed religion.

The Restoration was also the time when John Locke wrote many of his philosophical works:

Locke's empiricism was an attempt at understanding the basis of human understanding itself and thereby devising a proper manner for making sound decisions.

These same scientific methods led Locke to his three Treatises on Government, which later inspired the thinkers in the American Revolution.

emphasizes the plastic nature of the social contract. For an age that had seen absolute monarchy overthrown, democracy attempted, democracy corrupted, and limited monarchy restored, only a flexible basis for government could be satisfying.

The Restoration moderated most of the more strident sectarian writing, but radicalism persisted after the Restoration:

Puritan authors such as John Milton were forced to retire from public life or adapt,

-<and those authors who had preached against monarchy and who had participated directly in the regicide of Charles I were partially suppressed.

Consequently, violent writings were forced underground, and many of those who had served in the Interregnum attenuated their positions in the Restoration.

It is impossible to satisfactorily date the beginning of the novel in English. However, long fiction and fictional biographies began to distinguish themselves from other forms in England during the Restoration period.:

An existing tradition of Romance fiction in France and Spain was popular in England.

The "Romance" was considered a feminine form, and women were taxed with reading "novels" as a vice.

One of the most significant figures in the rise of the novel in the Restoration period is Aphra Behn.She was not only the first professional female novelist, but she may be among the first professional novelists of either sex in England. Behn's most famous novel was Oroonoko in 1688. This was a biography of an entirely fictional African king who had been enslaved in Suriname. Behn's novels show the influence of tragedy and her experiences as a dramatist.

As soon as the previous Puritan regime's ban on public stage representations was lifted, the drama recreated itself quickly and abundantly.

The most famous plays of the early Restoration period are the unsentimental or "hard" comedies of John Dryden, which reflect the atmosphere at Court, and celebrate an aristocratic macho lifestyle of unremitting sexual intrigue and conquest.

After a sharp drop in both quality and quantity in the 1680s, the mid-90s saw a brief second flowering of the drama, especially comedy. Comedies like:

William Congreve's Love For Love (1695) and The Way of the World (1700),

and John Vanbrugh's The Relapse (1696) and The Provoked Wife (1697) were "softer" and more middle-class in ethos, very different from the aristocratic extravaganza twenty years earlier, and aimed at a wider audience, to more socially mixed audiences with a strong middle-class element, and to female spectators, for instance by moving the war between the sexes from the arena of intrigue into that of marriage.

- The focus in comedy is less on young lovers outwitting the older generation, more on marital relations after the wedding bells.