For the period of the Restoration, a Wikipedia author nails the tumultuous situation pretty well: “It is a literature that includes extremes, for it encloses both Paradise Lost and the Earl of Rochester’s Sodom, the high-spirited sexual comedy of The Country Wife and the moral wisdom of Pilgrim’s Progress. It saw Locke’s Treatises on Government, the founding of the Royal Society, the experiments and holy meditations of Robert Boyle, the hysterical attacks on theaters from Jeremy Collier, and the pioneering of literary criticism from John Dryden and John Dennis. It saw news become a commodity, the essay develop into a periodical artform, the beginnings of textual criticism, and the emergence of the stock market.”
{source: Wikipedia, Restoration literature, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restoration_literature}