literature: in its daring lyrics and intricate political allegories, in the vitr

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and bristling topicality of its satires as well as the imaginative flight of its
mock-epics, fictions, and heroic verse.
The literature written between the years of the Cromwellian Protectorate
and the coalescence of the Georgian state makes high demands on our
knowledge of historical particulars, but its topicality should not obscure
the reach of literary imagination, the inventiveness of literary design, or the
generic resourcefulness of an age that created theatre rivaling the Elizabethan
stage, opera that went beyond the extravagance of the early Stuart
masque, political theory unmatched in analytical maturity - and always a
capacity for irony that quickens the most familiar literary forms. Pastoral
and georgic were deepened by Milton and Marvell; such modes as allegory,
romance, and travel narrative were transformed into that modern epic
form, the novel; while women writers, emboldened by the upheavals that
challenged hierarchies and overturned the social order in the 1650s, wrote
beyond the earlier confines of devotion and lyric. From what might seem a
paradoxical space - opened after 1660 by court culture and Tory, indeed
patriarchal, ideology - Aphra Behn, Mary Astell, and Delarivier Manley
embarked on bold careers in theatrical writing, philosophy, and the novel.
They not only imitated and admired men's writing, they also mocked and
challenged their male peers.
Indeed, mockery, scandal, and envy drove much of the satire we associate
with this world; but Marvell's Last Instructions, Swift's Modest Proposal,
and Pope's Dunciad continue to engage us by their moral authority and
their verbal mastery. Pastoral and epic were inverted and mocked to
brilliant effect, but in these same years Virgil, Juvenal, Horace, and Homer
were rendered classics not of translation but of a self-conscious national
literature. Dryden's Virgil and Pope's Horace are texts central to English
literary culture, and it is partly in homage to their evocative power that the
late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries have often been thought of
as an Augustan age. This was a time that embraced strong cultural
experimentation but also enduring meditations on antiquity.
Once glossed over as an age of court corruption and social comedy, a
mere pause in the progress of English liberty and English letters, the years
between the Cromwellian Protectorate and the coalescence of the Georgian
state are now valued for their political sophistication, their philosophical even spiritual - strengths, and their daring experiments with social and
sexual identities. Indeed, it is the pervasive sense of irony and contingency
in this age, its subtleties and ambiguities, and its inflections of gender that
remind critics and scholars of nothing so much as our own time.