Studies in English Protestant Dissent and Literature After 1662

The recognition of a defining literary culture aligned with Protestant dissent after 1662 acknowledges not only the significance of religious identity in writers whose primary experience is (after 17 August 1662) varying degrees of civil and religious persecution but also how that experience is articulated through the literary sensibilities of well‐educated scholars of Biblical narrative and rhetoric. At the forefront of this canon are figures primarily associated with England's recent revolutionary past—such as Milton, Bunyan, Baxter, and Fox—many of whom remained active after 1660—as well as later authors who, like Defoe, were themselves often trained for the ministry, and who engaged firsthand with the emerging prominence of new forms of fiction, such as the novel, which in turn developed in the wake of popular didactic writing including spiritual biographies and conduct works.