The literary culture of nonconformity in later seventeenth - century England

Nonconformist writing of the later seventeenth century does not figure largely in our literary histories nor does it impinge at all forcefully upon our sense of the dominant character of Restoration literature. The received impression is that, as Puritanism petered out after its political defeat in 1660-2, its cultural and literary life became henceforth a backwater, increasingly narrow-minded, sectarian and dull, with nothing to offer as lively and interesting as the work produced for, and under the patronage of, the Restored court, church and beau monde, Since no such enfeebled tradition could have nourished the genius of Milton and Bunyan, they tend to be presented as the exceptions which prove the rule, men shaped by the revolutionary 1640s rather than the nonconformist 1660s and 1670s and liberated from their disabling religious constraints by their own individuality. The present study dissents from this view and seeks to claim for nonconformist writing as a whole a more significant place in our literary history than it has hitherto been accorded. -- Preface