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Overview"This book argues that philosophical skepticism helps define the aesthetic experience of the sublime in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British literature, especially the poetry of Alexander Pope. Skeptical doubt appears in the period as an astonishing force in discourse that cannot be controlled--""doubt's boundless Sea,"" in Rochester's words--and as such is consistently seen as affiliated with the sublime, itself emerging as an important way to conceive of excessive power in rhetoric, nature, psychology, religion, and politics. This view of skepticism as a force affecting discourse beyond its practitioners' control links Noggle's discussion to other theoretical accounts of sublimity, especially psychoanalytic and ideological ones, that emphasize the sublime's activation of unconscious personal and cultural anxieties and contradictions. But because The Skeptical Sublime demonstrates the sublime's roots in the epistemological obsessions of Pope and his age, it also grounds such theories in what is historically evident in the period's writing. The skeptical sublime is a concrete, primary instance of the transformation of modernity's main epistemological liability, its loss of certainty, into an aesthetic asset--retaining, however, much of the unsettling irony of its origins in radical doubt. By examining the cultural function of such persistent instability, this book seeks to clarify the aesthetic ideology of major writers like Pope, Swift, Dryden, and Rochester, among others, who have been seen, sometimes confusingly, as both reactionary and supportive of the liberal-Whig model of taste and civil society increasingly dominant in the period. While they participate in the construction of proto-aesthetic categories like the sublime to stabilize British culture after decades of civil war and revolution, their appreciation of the skepticism maintained by these means of stabilization helps them express ambivalence about the emerging social order and distinguishes their views from the more providentially assured appeals to the sublime of their ideological opponents." Full Product DetailsAuthor: James Noggle (Assistant Professor of English, Assistant Professor of English, Wellesley College)Publisher: Oxford University Press Imprint: Oxford University Press Dimensions: Width: 15.00cm , Height: 3.10cm , Length: 22.90cm Weight: 0.590kg ISBN: 9780195142457ISBN 10: 0195142454 Pages: 288 Publication Date: 15 November 2001 Audience: Professional and scholarly , Professional & Vocational Format: Hardback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: Manufactured on demand We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier. Table of Contents1: Introduction: The Skeptical Sublime - Aesthetic Ideology in Pope and the Tory Satirists 2: The Abyss of Reason: Rochester, Dryden, and the Skeptical Origins of Sublimity 3: Civil Enthusiasm in A Tale of a Tub 4: The Public Universe: An Essay on Man and the Limits of the Sublime Tradition 5: Pope's mitations of Horace and the Authority of Inconsistency 6: Knowing Ridicule and Skeptical Reflection in the Moral Essays 7: Modernity and the Skeptical Sublime in the Final Dunciad Notes Bibliography IndexReviewsThe importance of James Noggle's fine study lies both in its challenge to our expectations of where we are likely to encounter the sublime, and in its realignment of the trope's philosophical affiliations ... This study ends with a compelling discussion of the final Dunciad. Kelly Grovier, Times Literary Supplement The importance of James Noggle's fine study lies both in its challenge to our expectations of where we are likely to encounter the sublime, and in its realignment of the trope's philosophical affiliations.... This study ends with a compelling discussion of the final Dunciad. --Times Literary Supplement The importance of James Noggle's fine study lies both in its challenge to our expectations of where we are likely to encounter the sublime, and in its realignment of the trope's philosophical affiliations.... This study ends with a compelling discussion of the final Dunciad. --Times Literary Supplement Author InformationTab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |