The Oxford Handbook of Restoration Literature

The Oxford Handbook of Restoration Literature begins by asking if there was a distinctive literature of the Restoration. For a long time, the answer seemed obvious: heroic drama, libertine comedy, scandalous lyrics, and the short but brilliant career of John Wilmot, earl of Rochester. Could there be an age when the coincidence of literary culture and political rule were any more obvious? But as this Handbook will remind us, some of the most wonderful literature of this Restoration came from writers who had lived across the decades of turbulence and into an age when the Stuart kings returned, when the Church and House of Lords were restored, a world made safe for bishops and for the memory of divine right rule. Of course, these returns and restorations did not meet with uniform celebration. John Milton wrote his great epic poems not in quiet submission but in a kind of resistance to the dominant culture of the 1660s, and Andrew Marvell produced his most brilliant satiric verse by holding up a looking glass to court corruption and Anglican intolerance. So we begin with the most obvious conclusion: Restoration literature does and does not fit to the categories that so long defined the late Stuart age.

This bookexplores and contests, challenges and reimagines the experience embodied by the writing of the late Stuart world and invites readers new to this world and those who have often read its literatures to the pleasures but as well to the challenges and discomforts of its texts.

Steven N. Zwicker, Professor Emeritus, Washington University in St. Louis, Matthew C. Augustine, Senior Lecturer in English, University of St Andrews

As an undergraduate, Matthew C Augustine studied English, Rhetoric, and French at the University of Illinois and then went on to graduate study at Washington University in St Louis, where he became interested in the literary and political cultures of seventeenth-century England. Much of his work has been devoted to deforming the distinctions, boundaries, and oppositions that have traditionally governed our understanding of this period and of its cultural regimes. The poet and politician Andrew Marvell has for several years been a central focus, but he has also written and collaborated widely in studying seventeenth-century literature and literary culture.

Steven N. Zwicker was born in San Diego, California, and grew up in Los Angeles. Since his undergraduate days at UCLA, he has been interested in early modern literature, especially the literature of the civil war years and Restoration. Hisgraduate work was directed by Barbara Lewalski at Brown University and when he began teaching at Washington University in St Louis the late historian John Pocock taught the history of political thought at the university. Pocock’s work and teaching opened for Zwicker a new way to understand relations between politics and literary culture, and he has worked along that axis for a number of years, writing and teaching about Marvell, Milton, Rochester, and Dryden, and, more broadly, Restoration culture and politics.