The times between the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and the death of the last Stuart
ruler in 1714 saw many profound changes. Power gradually shifted from the monarch to Parliament; science and empiricism nudged God from the absolute centre of things; money
and wealth challenged heredity. The development towards what we nowadays would
consider a ‘modern’ state did not go smoothly, though. There is a to and fro between old and
new. Hence, the Restoration period is full of crises, conflicts and paradoxes. Sometimes the people seem like our near contemporaries and sometimes like quaint bewigged figures from
a very distant time.
In this seminar, students will reconstruct the most important facets of Restoration culture
and its “structure of feeling” (Williams 69), by applying neo-historical readings to a broad
range of texts “from poems to buildings and dress fashions” (Williams 70). The aim will be
to practise the methodologies of a historiographic approach in Cultural Studies and to get to
know some intriguing Restoration texts from Thomas Hobbes’s The Leviathan to William
Congreve’s The Way of the World. The texts will be made available on Moodle.
ruler in 1714 saw many profound changes. Power gradually shifted from the monarch to Parliament; science and empiricism nudged God from the absolute centre of things; money
and wealth challenged heredity. The development towards what we nowadays would
consider a ‘modern’ state did not go smoothly, though. There is a to and fro between old and
new. Hence, the Restoration period is full of crises, conflicts and paradoxes. Sometimes the people seem like our near contemporaries and sometimes like quaint bewigged figures from
a very distant time.
In this seminar, students will reconstruct the most important facets of Restoration culture
and its “structure of feeling” (Williams 69), by applying neo-historical readings to a broad
range of texts “from poems to buildings and dress fashions” (Williams 70). The aim will be
to practise the methodologies of a historiographic approach in Cultural Studies and to get to
know some intriguing Restoration texts from Thomas Hobbes’s The Leviathan to William
Congreve’s The Way of the World. The texts will be made available on Moodle.
- Kursleiter/in: Anette Pankratz
Semester: WiSe 2023/24