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26 - From Revolution to Restoration in English literary culture

from 5 - The Civil War and Commonwealth era

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
James Turner
Edited by
David Loewenstein  and
Janel Mueller
David Loewenstein
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Janel Mueller
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
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Summary

Among Charles II’s first political initiatives was an Act of Indemnity and Oblivion, but most recent scholars of the early Restoration have tried to undo both the ‘Oblivion’ and the ‘Uniformity’ mandated by the new regime. Literary history no longer separates Milton and Marvell from their context, nor does it confidently proclaim a new ‘Age of Dryden’ starting in 1660. Sympathetic historians stress the persistence of ‘revolutionary’ or ‘nonconformist’ culture under persecution and the continuities in those poets’ writing careers; revisionists stress the relative stability of social attitudes before and after the regicide. In this final chapter my task is to bring out connections and continuities with the literary-historical themes and institutions that have shaped the entire volume. Rather than minimising the effect of 1660 or replicating its polarised propaganda, however, I suggest that the epochal changes of the Restoration incorporated and preserved the defeated ‘English Revolution’ in its memory. My paradigm derives from the Vanity Fair episode in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, both a general allegory of the World, the Flesh and the Devil and a precise portrait of the drunken, jeering, conformist culture of the early Restoration, which taunts the austere and disdainful pilgrim for his black clothing and godly dialect, tries to force him into consumerism, and then installs him in a cage at the very centre of the Fairground. That cage preserves the marginalised ‘Puritan’ at the very centre of the victors’ culture, and guarantees some receptiveness, however hostile, to his resurgence.

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The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature , pp. 790 - 833
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2003

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