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Execution of Charles I
As a culmination of political and military conflicts between the royalists and the parlamentarians (English Civil War, 1642-1651), Charles I was captured, taken to court and beheaded, guilty of exerting "unlimited and tyrannical power, overthrowing the rights and liberties of the people." -
The Commonwealth / The Interregnum (1649-60)
This was the political structure during the period 1649-60 when England, later along with Ireland and Scotland, were governed as a republic. In 1653, the Rump Parliament dissolved and Oliver Cromwell became Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland, till 1659. -
Restoration (1660-88)
Cromwell's death triggered the decadence of the Commonwealth regime; the Rump Parliament was reinstalled and soon Charles II was back to the throne. -
Wycherley's The Country Wife
Reflecting an anti-Puritan ideology in its sexually loaded themes and puns, this Restoration comedy makes a prototypical exemplar of its genre. The plot develops through a libertine's trick (Horner) who pretends near impotence to safely have clandestine affairs with married women, and an inexperienced "country wife" who arrives in London to discover sexual pleasures. The social grammar of the period is depicted in the oppositions of gender, class, young/old, town/country & nature/affectation. -
Aphra Behn's The Rover
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Aphra Behn's Oroonoko
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Defoe's Robinson Crusoe
Traditionally considered the first English novel, it narrates the story of a sailor who survives a number of shipwrecks and spends part of his life on an island, where he encounters many hardships until he's rescued and comes back to England. It complies with Watt's principle of verisimilitude: the ordinary story of person of his time, who has an ordinary name, past and family background, the events are causes of given consequences, there is reference to specific time, places historical events. -
Swift's Gulliver's Travels
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Richardson's Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded
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Fielding's The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
Written by Henry Fielding, it is one of the works taken by Watt to explain the rise of the novel in the XVIIIth century. -
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
