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At Zero Pointpresents an entirely new way of looking at Restoration culture, discourse, and satire. The book locates a rupture in English culture and epistemology not at the end of the eighteenth century (when it occurred in France) but at the end of the seventeenth century. Rose Zimbardo's hypothesis is based on Hans Blumenberg's concept of \"zero point\" -- the moment when an epistemology collapses under the weight of questions it has itself raised and simultaneously a new epistemology begins to construct itself. Zimbardo demonstrates that the Restoration marked both the collapse of the Renaissance order and the birth of modernism (with its new conceptions of self, nation, gender, language, logic, subjectivity, and reality). Using satire as the site for her investigation, Zimbardo examines works by Rochester, Oldham, Wycherley, and the early Swift for examples of Restoration deconstructive satire that, she argues, measure the collapse of Renaissance epistemology. Constructive satire, as exemplified in works by Dryden, has at its discursive center the \"I\" from which all order arises to be projected to the external world. No other book treats Restoration culture or satire in this way.

In this provocative study Rose Zimbardo examines a crucial revolution in aesthetics that took place in the late seventeenth century and that to this day dominates our response to literature. Although artists of that time continued to follow the precept \"imitate nature,\" that nature no longer corresponds to the earlier understanding of the term. What had been in essence an allegorical mode came to be a literal one. Focusing on the drama of the period as an exemplary form, Zimbardo shows how it moved from depicting a metaphysical reality of idea to portraying an inner reality of individual experience. But drama is constrained in expressing the inner experience since its medium is limited to human action. The novel arose to replace drama as the popular literary form, Zimbardo argues, because it could better and more freely convey man's inner world and thereby imitate the \"new\" nature. The study concluded that the changes which took place in drama during this period and which led to the invention of the novel resulted not from any \"change of heart\" or sensibility but from a fundamental change in the understanding of the nature which art was thought to imitate. Neither the drama of the 1690s nor the early novel, Zimbardo finds, was in the least \"sentimental.\" A Mirror to Naturebrings a new critical perspective to bear on literary developments at the end of the seventeenth century -- one that must be considered by critics and historians of the period.

At Zero Point presents an entirely new way of looking at Restoration culture, discourse, and satire.The book locates a rupture in English culture and epistemology not at the end of the eighteenth century (when it occurred in France) but at the end of the seventeenth century.

A historical analysis of literature and criticism in England during the restoration period is presented. The period has been understood only in relation to the 18th century largely because it was scrutinized by 18th century critics.

London's Geographies, 1600-1811 [Guildford Press, 1998], takes the same kind of broad interdisciplinary approach to the force of change as it is registered in eighteenthcentury London. Kevis Goodman, in Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism (Cambridge University Press, 2004), expands the subject of georgic to a study of broad cultural history, including the history of feelings, scientific technology, and print culture: her central argument maintains that the georgic allows us to perceive history in terms of feeling. The Botanic Vernacular in the English Novel (Oxford University Press, 2003), investigates the botanical craze inspired by Linnaeus in the eighteenth century and the battles it inaugurated over the supposed \"prurience\" of botany, offering detailed readings of the courtship novel that the supposed interconnection between botany and sexuality engendered.