Scepticism and literature : an essay on Pope, Hume, Sterne, and Johnson
Fred Parker, Graham Frederick Parker, University Lecturer in English Fred Parker
'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 thepretensions of reason, precept, and language went hand in hand with a vigorous intellectual, moral, and linguistic confidence. To realise 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, relates it more broadly to the social self-consciousness of eighteenth-century culture, and discusses its source in Locke and its inspiration in Montaigne. The argument serves as a reminder that radical scepticism is not the invention of the late twentieth century, and that itsstrategies and implications have never been more interestingly explored than in the eighteenth.
Jahr:
2003
Auflage:
1
Verlag:
Oxford University Press on Demand
Sprache:
english
Seiten:
290
ISBN 10:
0199253188
ISBN 13:
9780199253180
Datei:
PDF, 16.82 MB
IPFS:
,
english, 2003