Overview

Ravishment of Reason examines the heroic dramas written for the restored English theatres in the later seventeenth century, reading them as complex and sophisticated responses to a crisis of public life in the wake of the mid-century regicide and revolution. The unique form of the Restoration heroic play, with its scenes of imperial conquest peopled by hesitating and indecisive heroes, interrogates traditional oppositions of agency and passivity, autonomy and servility, that structure conventional narratives of political service and public virtue, exploring, in the process, new and often unsettling models of order and governance. Situating the dramas of Dryden, Behn, Boyle, Lee, and Crowne in their historical and intellectual context of civil war and the destabilizing theories of government that came in its wake, Brandon Chua offers an account of a culture’s attempts to reconcile civic purpose with political stability after an age of revolutionary change.

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9781611485820

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[An] intelligent reconsideration of the Restoration heroic play. SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500-1900

[An] intelligent reconsideration of the Restoration heroic play. * SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 *

Author Information

Brandon Chua is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Queensland node of the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (Europe 1100-1800), where he is currently researching the literary culture of the English 1650s in relation to the civil wars and Interregnum. He also teaches early modern and eighteenth-century literature at The University of Queensland.

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