Restoration literature is the literature written in English during the
period commonly referred to as the English Restoration, corresponding
with the last years of the direct Stuart reign in England, Scotland,
Wales, and Ireland. In general, the term is used to denote roughly
homogeneous styles of literature that centre on a celebration of or
reaction to the restored court of Charles II. It is a literature that
includes extremes, for it encloses both Paradise Lost and the Earl of
Rochester's Sodom, the high-spirited sexual comedy of The Country Wife
and the moral wisdom of Pilgrim's Progress. It saw Locke's Treatises
on Government, the founding of the Royal Society, the experiments and
holy meditations of Robert Boyle, the hysterical attacks on theatres
from Jeremy Collier, and the pioneering of literary criticism from
John Dryden and John Dennis. It saw news become a commodity, the essay
develop into a periodical artform, the beginnings of textual
criticism, and the emergence of the stock market.
Read the rest of this article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restoration_literature
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Today's selected anniversaries:
1778:
Captain James Cook discovered the Sandwich Islands, now known as
Hawaii.
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Hawaii)
1871:
King Wilhelm I of Prussia was proclaimed the first Kaiser of the
German Empire, a newly unified nation state.
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_I_of_Germany)
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Empire)
1958:
Willie O'Ree of the Boston Bruins played his first game in the
National Hockey League, breaking the color barrier in professional ice
hockey.
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willie_O'Ree)
1977:
The mysterious Legionnaires' disease was found to be caused by a novel
bacterium now known as Legionella.
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legionellosis)
2003:
The Canberra Firestorm: Bushfires burning out of control began blazing
through residential areas of Canberra, Australia.
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canberra_bushfires_of_2003)
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Wikiquote of the day:
It's important to abolish the unconscious dogmatism that makes people
think their way of looking at reality is the only sane way of viewing
the world. My goal is to try to get people into a state of
generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone, but
agnosticism about everything. -- Robert Anton Wilson
(
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_Anton_Wilson)