Historical literatures recovers a rich, vibrant and complex tradition of Restoration and early-eighteenth century English historical writing. -- .

'I have called my poem historical, not epic,' John Dryden explained in the dedication to his panegyric Annus Mirabilis, 'though both the actions and actors are as much heroic, as any poem can contain.'While it's unlikely that any critic today would class Annus Mirabilis with Paradise Lost and the Iliad, it seems remarkable that the poem's other purpose-its role as 'an historical poem'-has so sharply receded from view. Historical Literatures recovers the forgotten historiographical element in works like Dryden's, surveying some of the many different forms in which Restoration and early-eighteenth-century writers represented their nation's past. In the process, it reveals that many of the genres we now view primarily as 'literary'-verse satire and panegyric, memoir, scandal chronicle-were also being used to represent historical phenomena. Like Dryden, many Restoration and early-eighteenth-century writers made their choice of historical subject matter into an explicit topic for discussion, presenting themselves as historians or describing their works as contributions to an English historical tradition. Working outside the boundaries of formal historical narrative, writers like Andrew Marvell, Daniel Defoe, Delarivier Manley and John Evelyn were able to develop new techniques for representing the past, ultimately changing the way that their contemporaries understood recent history and the history of the individual.