Restoration Readings (050732-WiSe21/22)

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.