Restoration Literature 1660-1700

Dryden, Bunyan, and Pepys

By James Runcieman Sutherland

1969

First Published

4.00

Average Rating

598

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18H09M

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Part of Series

Oxford History of English Literature book cover 1

Oxford History of English Literature

Series · 15 books

By J.I.M. Stewart, E.K. Chambers, William Lindsay Renwick, and more

This volume deals with what is often called the age of Dryden. Dryden, as the greatest poet and critic of the Restoration period and one of its leading dramatists, has been given fuller treatment here than any other writer. But this was also the age of Bunyan, of Halifax and Locke, of Boyle and Newton. And the period is unusually rich in writers just short of the highest rank—the dramatists Etherege, Shadwell, Wycherley, Otway, Lee, and Congreve; the preachers Barrow, South, and Tillotson; the historians Clarendon and Burnet; Samuel Butler, Charles Cotton and Rochester among the poets; and miscellaneous writers like Evelyn and Pepys, Aubrey, Cowley and Sir William Temple. The three longest chapters—two on drama and one on religion—will show where the main emphasis of this curiously divided period really fell; but due weight is given to the historians and biographers, the essayists and journalists, the men of science, the poets, the politicians, the writers of fiction, and lastly—in this critical and controversial age—the critics.

Avg Rating

4.00

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Author

James Runcieman Sutherland

Author · 1 books

James Runcieman Sutherland, English scholar and teacher: Senior Lecturer, University College London 1930-36; Professor of English Literature, Birkbeck College 1936-44; Editor, Review of English Studies 1940-47; Professor of English Language and Literature, Queen Mary College 1944-51; Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature, University College London 1951-67 (Emeritus); FBA 1953; Public Orator, London University 1957-62; Knighted 1992. He will be remembered also by many thousands of people who have little academic interest in literature but who enjoy and keep returning to The Oxford Book of English Talk (1953) and The Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes (1975) which he compiled. Some other works include Defoe (1937), A Preface to Eighteenth Century Poetry (1948), Alexander Lectures in Toronto (On English Prose, 1957) and the Clark Lectures in Cambridge (English Satire, 1958), English Literature of the Later Seventeenth Century (1969), Daniel Defoe: a critical study (1971), The Restoration Newspaper and its Development (1986), and an attribution study on Swift (1992).