Asiya Marriyam

  The era from 1660 to 1700 is considered the period of the Restoration. King Charles II was elevated to the throne in 1660. As a consequence of Cromwell's strict law, the people of England suffered from tension. The country thus accepted the restoration of Charles II. A revolutionary shift in social life and literature was brought about by this restoration. There are the following features that distinguish this period: THE RESTORATION :  Gravity, theological zeal, moral earnestness, and decorum were thrown to the winds during this period. The King was a profound debaucher. He had several mistresses. The crooked courtiers surrounded him. Corruption in all walks of life has been rampant.   Religious and Political Quarrels : We see the creation of two political parties in the Reconstruction period. They were the Tories and the Whigs. The Whigs opposed, and the Tories supported the king. The emergence of these parties has provided new meaning to men of literary competence. T...

  The Literature of the Seventeenth Century may be divided into two periods— The Puritan Age or the Age of Milton (1600-1660) , which is further divided into the Jacobean and Caroline periods after the names of the ruled James I and Charles I, who rules from 1603 to 1625 and 1625 to 1649 respectively; and the Restoration Period or the Age of Dryden (1660-1700). The Seventeenth Century was marked by the decline of the Renaissance spirit, and the writers either imitated the great masters of Elizabethan period or followed new paths. We no longer find great imaginative writers of the stature of Shakespeare, Spenser and Sidney. There is a marked change in temperament which may be called essentially modern. Though during the Elizabethan period, the new spirit of the Renaissance had broken away with the medieval times, and started a new modern development, in fact it was in the seventeenth century that this task of breaking away with the past was completely accomplished, and the mo...

  The Renaissance Period in English literature is also called the Elizabethan Period or the Age of Shakespeare. The middle Ages in Europe were followed by the Renaissance. Renaissance means the Revival of Learning, and it denotes in its broadest sense the gradual enlightenment of the human mind after the darkness of the Middle Ages. With the fall of Constantinople in 1453 A.D. by the invasion of the Turks, the Greek scholars who were residing there, spread all over Europe, and brought with them invaluable Greek manuscripts. The discovery of these classical models resulted in the Revival of Learning in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The essence of this movement was that “man discovered himself and the universe”, and that “man , so long blinded had suddenly opened his eyes and seen”. The flood of Greek literature which the new art of printing carried swiftly to every school in Europe revealed a new world of poetry and philosophy. Along with the Revival of Learning, n...