Writing the Stuart restoration: political time, cultural time, and literary periodicity

In this substantial and wide-ranging introduction to the field of Restoration literature, the editors reflect on the historical pressures of remembering and forgetting, pressures bound up with the construction of Restoration itself, discernible in parliamentary acts and literary panegyrics that sought to adjudicate the viability of the past in order to stamp a politically and providentially ordered future. ‘Oh Happy Age! Oh times like those alone / By Fate reserv’d for Great Augustus Throne!’, the future poet laureate John Dryden enthused of the monarch and the monarchy re-established in 1660, in heroic couplets that braided together the restoration of arms and arts. As the ‘redux’ of Dryden’s title (Astraea Redux) hints, however, the Restoration was at once a project of self-conscious newness and of historical returns, a paradox and a conundrum that conditioned much of what we call ‘Restoration literature’, a field of endeavour that included theatre and wit but also arts of devotion, of criticism, of philosophy, and of world-making imagination at the threshold of modernity.