Scepticism and literature
Subtitle: an essay on Pope, Hume, Sterne, and Johnson
By: Fred Parker.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2003
Place of publication: Oxford; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 290
Subjects: Pope, Alexander, 1688-1744 -- Philosophy; Sterne, Laurence, 1713-1768 -- Philosophy; Johnson, Samuel, 1709-1784 -- Philosophy; Hume, David, 1711-1776; English literature -- 18th century -- History and criticism; Skepticism in literature; Skepticism -- Great Britain -- History -- 18th century; Great Britain -- Intellectual life -- 18th century
Description: "'The more we enquire, the less we can resolve, ' wrote Johnson. Scepticism - a reasoned emphasis on the severe limitations of rationality - would seem to undermine the grounds of belief and action. But in some of the best eighteenth-century literature, a theoretically paralysing critique of the pretensions of reason, precept, and language went hand in hand with a vigorous intellectual, moral, and linguistic confidence. To realize philosophical scepticism as literature was effectively to transform it. Dr. Parker traces the presence of this life-giving irony in works by Pope, Hume, Sterne, and Johnson, discusses its source in Locke and its inspiration in Montaigne, and relates it more broadly to the social self-consciousness of eighteenth-century culture. The argument serves as a reminder that radical scepticism is not the invention of the late twentieth century, and that its strategies and implications have never been more interestingly explored than in the eighteenth."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [282]-285) and index.