What specifically distinguishes Restoration culture and society from what went before and came after? And how did early modern British women and men accommodate themselves to the dramatic historical changes of the seventeenth century? This study, which brings together recent work by leading historians as well as literary and cultural critics of the period, shows how the Restoration produced the concept of a national literature crucial to a new nationalist cultural enterprise: questions of national identity and difference, of what it meant to be English or British or both, came to be framed in terms of international trade and imperial ambition; and religious and royal authority gave way before the advance of a secular literary culture geared to the demands of a developing commercial and imperial nation.