The Skeptical Sublime: Aesthetic Ideology in Pope and the Tory Satirists

by James Noggle

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...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195142454
• ISBN13: 9780195142457
• Release Date: November 2001
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 1.28 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.4" x 9.6"