This course examines the ways in which seventeenth-century literature (the Interregnum exempted) participates in the wider problematics concerning notions of authority, legitimation and resistance, as articulated by the political theories of James I, Hobbes and Locke. It focuses on the contradictions and complexities deriving from the subject’s position in the face of absolutist government while, at the same time, it shifts the emphasis from the gentry to the representation of the people’s agency, however ambiguous, in Restoration literature.