(Ebook) Scepticism and literature : an essay on Pope, Hume, Sterne, and Johnson by Fred Parker, Graham Frederick Parker, University Lecturer in English Fred Parker ISBN 9780199253180, 0199253188

(Ebook) Scepticism and literature : an essay on Pope, Hume, Sterne, and Johnson by Fred Parker, Graham Frederick Parker, University Lecturer in English Fred Parker ISBN 9780199253180, 0199253188

'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.