Culture and Society in the Stuart Restoration by Gerald MacLean - 9780521475662

Culture and Society in the Stuart RestorationLiterature, Drama, History\nAuthor(s): Gerald MacLean\nFormat: Paperback\nPublisher: Cambridge University Press, United Kingdom\nImprint: Cambridge University Press\nISBN-13: 9780521475662, 978-0521475662\nSynopsis\nWhat specifically distinguishes Restoration culture and society from what went before and came after? And how did early modern British women and men accommodate themselves to the dramatic historical changes of the seventeenth century? This study, which brings together recent work by leading historians as well as literary and cultural critics of the period, shows how the Restoration produced the concept of a national literature crucial to a new nationalist cultural enterprise: questions of national identity and difference, of what it meant to be English or British or both, came to be framed in terms of international trade and imperial ambition; and religious and royal authority gave way before the advance of a secular literary c.