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. The book'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 is under construction. Rose Zimbardo demonstrates that the Restoration marked 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 measure the collapse of Renaissance epistemology. Constructive satire, as exemplified in works by Dryden, expressed the modernist coding that reformulated the idea of self, invented interior space, and relocated truth in that inner human arena. For nearly forty years Zimbardo has been one of the leading scholars in the field. At Zero Point will be heralded as a capstone to her distinguished career.