- Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature

Catalog description

Literature in the ages of Dryden, Congreve, Swift, Addison, Pope, Johnson, and Sheridan. Plays, essays, and the tradition of derivative-epic poems, studied with regard to major social and intellectual dispositions of culture: humanism, the new science, individualism, psychology, mercantilism, urbanization, and sentimentality. The study appreciates the vigorously renewed dramatic tradition from the reopening of the theaters in 1660. It also recognizes the shift from patrician verse toward bourgeois prose manner in literature.