Main directions of the English Literature in the Early Middle ages

30.The influence of the restoration period to the literature.Restoration period.

The Restoration is an unusual historical period, as its literature is bounded by a specific political event: the restoration of the Stuart monarchy. It is unusual in another way, as well, for it is a time when the influence of that king's presence and personality permeated literary society to such an extent that, almost uniquely, literature reflects the court. The adversaries of the restoration, the Puritans and democrats and republicans, similarly respond to the peculiarities of the king and the king's personality. Therefore, a top-down view of the literary history of the Restoration has more validity than that of most literary epochs. "The Restoration" as a critical concept covers the duration of the effect of Charles and Charles's manner. This effect extended beyond his death, in some instances, and not as long as his life, in others.The Restoration was an age of poetry. Not only was poetry the most popular form of literature, but it was also the most significant form of literature, as poems affected political events and immediately reflected the times. It was, to its own people, an age dominated only by the king, and not by any single genius. Throughout the period, the lyric, ariel, historical, and epic poem was being developed.In literature the Restoration was a period of novelty, change and refoundation rather than of great writing. Apart from Paradise Lost and the 1662 Anglican Prayer Book, the only books from these forty years to have been read in every generation since are Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678-9), some poems by John Dryden, and the better Restoration comedies. The faith of Bunyan, the philosophy of John Locke, and the mathematics and optics of Sir Isaac Newton had more lasting cultural impact than any literary work of the period in verse, prose, or drama. An exception can be made for Dryden’s Absolom and Achitophel (1681), the model for a century of couplet satire. In a period of recurrent public crisis, writing was topical, allusive and factional, and the theatre was taken up with current affairs, political, ecclesiastical, and sexual. The newspaper and the novel were at hand.