Restoration Literature

Critical Approaches

Harold Love

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781040765500
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

Originally published in 1972, Restoration Literature is a landmark in the study of seventeenth-century English literature. By assembling a diverse range of critical voices, Love captures the vibrancy and complexity of a period marked by both artistic innovation and ideological strife. The book remains essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how literature responded to—and helped shape—the Restoration's turbulent cultural landscape. This book rehabilitates the literature of the restoration period and shows it to be worth the most careful critical attention. The book remains a foundational text for students and scholars interested in the complex interplay of politics, performance, satire, and poetic innovation that defined the era.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• Editions Used
• Restoration Comedy and the Provok'd Critic
• Restoration Tragedy as Total Theatre
• The Extravagant Rake in Restoration Comedy
• The Last of the Epics: The Rejection of the Heroic in Paradise Lost and Hudibras
• Thomas Traherne: Intellect and Felicity
• Rochester and the Traditions of Satire
• The Poems of John Oldham
• Two Restoration Prose-writers – Burnet and Halifax
• Diyden and Literary Good-breeding
• John Dryden, Gavin Douglas and Virgil
• John Dryden's Jacobitism
• Appendix
• Index