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This thesis builds upon recent work by historians such as Richard Greaves and Jonathan Scott which has revealed both a vibrant radical underground in Restoration England and the significant role that illicit, ‘seditious’ printing played in maintaining the circulation of radical discourse. These accounts focus principally upon the practice of censorship in the Restoration, and its infringement.  I contend, however, that the supporters of the Restoration also sought to control polemically the reception of texts whose oppositional rhetoric vindicated ideologies which challenged the authority of the Restoration. The thesis contends that a study of polemical matrices provides important new tools for understanding the continuities and changes in how the early modern public sphere operated. Whilst noting that the ‘Habermasian moment’ in early modern studies appears to be passing, the thesis offers in its place a model termed ‘the polemical matrix’. This seeks to account for the sheer responsiveness of much of the literature in this period, and focuses attention towards analysing how the acceptance or rejection of a text’s hermeneutical premises posits interpretation as a site for ideological contention. My research uncovers contemporary responses in correspondence, diaries, and manuscript marginalia, but concentrates on polemical exchanges within the literature. The thesis places these texts at the intersection of interpretation and rhetoric, highlighting how responses to previous arguments are pitched to persuade readers of the analytical validity of their readings. These are analysed in relation to three crises of authority: the ‘anarchy’ of 1659; the early years of the Restoration; and the debates over toleration in the late 1660s and early 1670s.

My thesis is that many political events and developments of the seventeenth century were subject matter of varying degrees of directness for the demonic scenes of many English epic poems. Also, a number of crucial antithesis - such as those between God and Satan, Heaven and Hell, good and evil, light and dark, virtue and vice - could be used by epic poets to structure their contemporary references. I consider how and why the rebellious forces of evil in certain poems - principally Satan and his servants - were connected to the century's political and religious controversies and polemics. In the Introduction I set down my aims and methods of procedure, and the areas in which I hope to make an original contribution to scholarship. In Chapter 1 I discuss the connections made between the demonic and politics in a number of epic poems written before the seventeenth century, as many of the features and techniques of seventeenth-century epic are prefigured in the earlier tradition. For example, I discuss Claudian and Tasso and how their poems provided models for later writers as regards the interaction of humans and devils in real conflicts. In Chapter 2 I focus upon Phineas Fletcher's <I>Locusts, or Apollyonists </I>(1627) and a number of other epics, such as Sir William Alexander's <I>Dooms-day </I>(1637), which deal briefly or at length with the Gunpowder Plot of November 1605 and, crucially, emphasize its infernal origins. In Chapter 3 I use Thomas Heywood's <I>Hierarchie of the blessed Angells </I>(1635) as a way into discussing biblical epics, such as Lucy Hutchinson's <I>Order and Disorder </I>(1679), and their relation of the underworld to contemporary concerns. In Chapter 4 I deal with three epics of the English Civil War - Joseph Beaumont's <I>Psyche </I>(1648; 1702), Edward Benlowes's <I>Theophila </I>(1652), and Abraham Cowley's unfinished <I>Civil War -</I> and a number of epics of the Restoration and after, such as Andrew Cooper's <I>Stratologia </I>(1660) and Sir Richard Blackmore's <I>Prince Arthur </I>(1695). In Chapter 5 I probe the relationship between the satanic scenes of Milton's <I>Paradise Lost </I>(1667) and the Civil War and Restoration years, with frequent recourse to Milton's own prose controversies.

The thesis examines Milton’s theological and poetic treatment of the Sea of God and the work of salvation and challenges the prevailing opinion in Milton studies that Milton adheres to Arian, Socinian, or psilanthropic tenets. Chapter one argues that Milton’s Christology and soteriology cannot be reconciled with Arianism either as a historical or in a technical sense. Christology necessarily entails soteriology, and Milton’s understanding of the incarnate Son as <i>theanthropos </i>establishes the importance of Christ’s mediatorial and redeeming role. Milton’s powerful conception of the pernicious effects of human sin cannot support an exemplarist, subjective atonement, and instead depends upon a unique, objective atonement. Chapter two analyses <i>Paradise</i><i> Lost</i>’s bipartite “great Argument” – the assertion of eternal providence and the justification of God’s ways – in fideistic rather than in purely rationalistic terms. The chapter re-evaluates the poem’s debt to Protestant and, in particular, Lutheran forensic discourse on the doctrine of justification. Chapter three offers a reading of Satan’s voyage across Books Three and Four of the epic and interprets the poem’s cosmos as operating according to a sacramental-allegorical poetic. The universe which Satan blindly traverses is an <i>explicatio filii Dei </i>and a copious manifestation of the Son’s <i>theanthropic</i> mediation. Chapter four presents a suggested cause for Milton’s representation of the Fall in Book Nine of <i>Paradise Lost</i> as Eve and Adam’s transgression of the law of charity, that is, the love of God, self and neighbour, which forms the basis for Milton’s understanding of natural law. In the final chapter, I demonstrate how, in addition to surprising Milton’s readers by sin, the affective stylistics of Fishian literary analysis can be applied to Milton’s treatment of the aftermath of the Fall to assure the poem’s readers of the provision of Grace. The thesis concludes by maintaining that Milton’s diffuse epic comprises a redemption song with a highly nuanced Christology and soteriology that is indissociable from a comprehensive critical appreciation of the poem’s central reading.

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Locke ridiculed Filmer's account of the monarchist doctrine of passive resistance. Where 'Men may not strike again', he remarked, they are reduced to 'imaginary <I>Resistance</I>'. That 'imaginary' begs a question since when Locke was writing the word could still be used in the neutral sense of 'imaginative', though he himself was using it pejoratively to mean 'fanciful' or 'non-existent'. The question of what 'imaginary' defiance can achieve against real political '<I>Force</I>' was pertinent at the time Locke's remark was published particularly to John Dryden, who, deprived for his Roman Catholicism of the public employments and salaries he had enjoyed as Poet Laureate and Historiographer-Royal, was committed then, as he said, to 'no Action, but that of the Soul'. This dissertation argues that Dryden put up substantial 'imaginary <I>Resistance</I>' against those 'unhappy Circumstances' in the main action of his soul after the Glorious Revolution - his translation of <I>The Works of Virgil</I> (1697). That resistance is apparent not in a sparse clutch of encoded criticisms of William III and his ministers (as though translating Virgil was just a cover for Dryden's Jacobite propaganda), but as a sustained abstention deep in and throughout the verse from the allurements of a self-involved poetic voice. In the troubled early decades of the seventeenth century English poets had (in common with the rest of their country men) been urged to such self-involvement, towards contracting the public scope of their imaginings, as peace was sought from the cacophony of voices raised in public which was the Civil War.

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This dissertation analyses taste, the conceptually vague discriminator of judgement, as it related to the numerous proposed strategies for evaluating creative writing between the Restoration and Alexander Pope's death in 1744. It investigates discussions about literature before the well-known efforts, such as Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets (1779-81), to elevate certain authors as exemplars of English writing. The raison d'etre of an authoritative system for judging literature was to restrain personal whim and prejudice by guiding individuals towards a specific manner or appreciation.

My examination of Aphra Behn’s drama explores three codes of power: a feudal code, a libertine code, and a commercial code.  Each chapter of the thesis explores what the code meant to Behn as she engaged with them in her plays.  Chapter 1 demonstrates that Behn’s early tragicomedies see through feudalism as an exclusively male code.  She opens up a serious debate for female participation in valiant deeds.  Chapter 2 examines Behn’s only tragedy, which questions the tangibility of women’s political involvement in the feudal structure. My discussion of libertinism forms a large portion of the thesis.  Chapter 3 considers how Behn’s early sex comedies depict low-born men who unjustly acquire titles and Cavalier rakes who destroy women’s reputations with their lustful whims.  Chapter 4 acknowledges an adjustment in Behn’s stance on libertinism.  She partly glamorises and partly dismantles the image of sexual potency in connection with the Cavalier male.  <i>The Rover</i> represents the dramatist’s first show of political support for the Stuarts, and she undoubtedly presents a more attractive version of her earlier rakish protagonists.  Chapter 5 examines Behn’s comedies written against the background of the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis.  She excelled at sex comedy and was keenly interested in pushing its generic boundaries. Behn’s mature work follows the two different directions of the continental escapism and London’s current affairs.  Her City plays trace the rise of tradesmen as a force to be reckoned with during the last two decades of Charles II’s rule.  Chapter 6 turns to the commercial code, and considers how Behn uses it as a different means of mocking her Puritan characters.   She explicitly parallels their wives and money as combined assets.