The art of oblivion

Abstract

This article enquires into the cultural uses of memory and forgetting in seventeenth-century England, focusing on strategic acts of recall and oblivion accompanying the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660. In a reading of three representative texts from the 1660s – Samuel Tuke's The Adventures of Five Hours, John Dryden's ‘Astraea Redux’, and John Milton's Paradise Lost – it examines the relationship between officially sanctioned fictions of state and dissenting literary-political counter-fictions. The analysis of calculated acts of oblivion, memory, and countermemory is intended to contribute to a more complex picture of the social, political, and literary interconnections after 1660. In this light, the Restoration appears not as a monolithic reaction against the so-called Interregnum, but as a series of cultural reorientations characterised by the urgency of finding acceptable representations of history and memory amidst competing rhetorics of cultural and religious identity.