It's paper time again, people. This stack of books is about half (maybe a third) of the sources I will use for one of my three major papers this semester. For this paper, which I am writing for my Restoration and Eighteenth Century class, I am writing on the tragedies of John Dryden. The reason I chose this study is because the study of Restoration Tragedy is sorely neglected. The truth is, there was so much bawdy sex humor being written that the more "serious" dramatic works have been overlooked.
Interestingly, the comic works aren't very strong dramatically speaking (though they are awful funny). For this reason, theatre schools consider very few plays of the period to be canonized. In fact, the term "Restoration Drama" as it is termed in theatre departments is a misnomer, since the primary works given this label are those by Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Oliver Goldsmith, both of whom wrote a full one hundred years after the Restoration of the British Monarchy.
That being said, the actual plays of the Restoration have largely been overlooked, save for endless anthologizing (it seems that archiving and anthologizing are favorite British pastimes). This is evidenced by the fact that a few of the book in the above pictured stack have not been checked out of UCO's library since 1978. Those that have have still only been checked out a few times since their printings, years and years ago.
Also in the works is a paper/presentation on Samuel Johnson's Dictionary and something on Gothicism.
