definitions of masculinity and femininity to conceptions of style, to the

discourse of sociability and sentiment, and to the languages of politics and

state.
The discourse of sociability was also articulated through the press, by
commerce, and in the reconfiguration of public spaces. The press had
become more than a vehicle for inflaming partisan tempers, it was central
to the cultivation of manners and the institution of fashion. The daily
newspaper and the weekly journal, clubs and coffee houses, the library, the
spa, and the public park all participated in the refashioning of self and
society. And a financial revolution that began as a way of funding William
Ill's wars to contain France resulted in an expanded domestic economy, in
the swelling of professions, the creation of empire, the importation of
luxury, and the profusion of that commodity called taste. How different
taste and empire must have seemed from the world of Ranters and
Muggletonians, but even as we calculate the distance between eighteenthcentury
civility and the projects of spiritual reform and political innovation
of the 1650s, we should remember that the Republican past was deeply
implicated in the aspirations and aesthetics, even the anxieties, of Georgian
England.
The essays in this volume extend an invitation to read the major texts, to
think about the central intellectual practices, and to imagine the relations
among the books, people, and politics of Restoration and early eighteenthcentury
England. These essays introduce the critical perspectives that shape
our current work in literary criticism and cultural history even as they
remind us of the aesthetic theories and literary practices of Augustan
England, a world in which social relations and the life of the state were
inextricably bound to the imagination of writers.