The Oxford handbook of Restoration literature

The Oxford Handbook of Restoration Literature takes as its theme the great variety of Restoration literary cultures: the drama; the scandals and lyrics of the court; the political turbulence across these decades of Stuart rule; and the great achievements of satire and epic, of the writings of John Milton, Lord Rochester, and John Dryden. But the Handbook looks beyond these wonderful and familiar territories to explore relations between natural philosophy and the literary imagination, the fashioning of the self in diaries and letters, the nature of the book trade, manuscript circulation, the fortunes of the playhouse, and the influence of empire and trade in this republic of letters. The Oxford Handbook of Restoration Literature delves into 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 challenges and discomforts of its texts, and to its manifold pleasures.