The skeptical sublime

"This book argues that philosophical skepticism helps define the aesthetic experience of the sublime in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British literature. Skeptical doubt appears in the period as an astonishing and uncontrollable force in discourse - "doubt's boundless Sea," in Rochester's words - and is consistently affiliated with the sublime as an important reaction to excessive power in rhetoric, nature, psychology, religion, and politics. This view of skepticism as a force beyond its practitioners' control links James Noggle's discussion to other theoretical accounts of sublimity, including ideological and psychoanalytic ones, that emphasize the sublime's activation of cultural conflicts and unconscious personal anxieties. The Skeptical Sublime demonstrates the sublime's roots in the epistemological obsessions of the age and clarifies 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 period's liberal-Whig model of taste and civil society. While these writers construct their stabilizing prot-aesthetic categories, they also maintain a skepticism that expresses ambivalence about the emerging social order and distinguishes their views from the more providentially assured appeals to the sublime of their ideological opponents."--Jacket.