This harmony, however, argues Gerald Marshall, was bought at the price of personal identity, making the Restoration not unlike the Protectorate in some ways. This “spirit of order” was essential to a cultural harmony following years of Civil War and its absence of a controlling monarchy-whether good or bad. Alexander Pope’s rather unflattering reference in Imitations of Horace to “Days of Ease, when now the weary Sword / Was sheath’d, and Luxury with Charles restor’d” plays on those excesses as well as on the fickle masses, as Dryden says, “Now Whig, now Tory.” The restoration of Charles II, however, was a momentous occasion, celebrated certainly by a large majority for bringing order-a prerequisite for eighteenth-century political and cultural stability. Indeed if popular and just occasionally academic history has become more novelistic in tone at times, then sometimes historical novels have become more academically serious.”Ĭertainly, scholars have long had a love/hate relationship with Restoration England’s excesses as well as with its political heavy-handedness. “Both the Elizabethan age and the Restoration,” explains Martha Rozett, “are frequent subjects of popular formula-fiction romances due to their distinctive, easily replicated atmospheres both also have inspired a great deal of serious, traditional historical fiction and fictionalized biography as well.” However, comparisons between historical fiction and actual history, contends Alan Marshall, often reveal that the two have little in common, “yet both genres possibly still have much to learn from one another.
In doing so, the author creates a “dynamic intertext: the works reflect the cultural charge that produced them, but the works may go on to affect the culture once they are re-produced.” But while authors have appropriated literary works for centuries, they have also appropriated historical settings and places well outside their own realities, creating new works in historical settings that reflect a new cultural purpose.
grounded in metaphors of conflict.” The concept may also be defined as taking possession of a text for one’s own, often cultural, purpose. The historical proliferation of authors “borrowing” the works of other authors has led to numerous critical studies in appropriation, what Christy Desmet characterizes as “literary influence.
0 kommentar(er)
