The aim of this volume is to introduce students to English literary culture in

one of its most volatile and politically engaged moments. The literature
created between the years of Republican ferment in the 1650s and the
coalescence of a Georgian state in the early eighteenth century reflects the
instability and partisanship of rebellious and factious times. But literature
in these years was more than a mirror of the age. Literary texts were central
to the celebration of civic persons and institutions, to polemic and party
formation, to the shaping of public opinion, indeed to the creation of
political consciousness itself.From the efforts of Marvell and Milton to forge a
Republican idiom in
the 1650s to the brilliant careers of Dryden, Rochester, and Behn, of Locke
and Astell, of Swift and Defoe, and of Pope and Montagu, the world of
letters was enmeshed with policy and faction. Writers created their texts
and fashioned their careers amidst recurrent political crisis and intrigue.
Poetry and theatre were encouraged by powerful aristocrats, but political
grandees also bullied and intimidated writers in a world marked by libel
and slander. Dryden's elegies on Anne Killigrew and Henry Purcell are
delicate constructs, Congreve's drama reveals a subtle theatrical culture,
Swift's allegories and Lord Hervey's memoirs, Pope's verse epistles and
Montagu's letters orchestrate an incomparable range of satirical registers.
But we should be mindful, even as we read their work, that theirs was an
age distinguished less by fragility and refinement than by obscenity and
brutality, by the hectoring of the press and the anger of parliamentary
debate, and by the fierce competitive edge of poetry no less than partisanship.
Political and social theory were the province of strong intellects Thomas Hobbes, James Harrington, Algernon Sidney, John Locke, Mary
Astell, and Bernard Mandeville - but political programs were often effected
by thugs, urban crowds, and political gangs.