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Sceptical Perspectives on Melancholy: Burton, Swift, Pope, Sterne

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Article

Change log

Authors

Tilmouth, Christopher  ORCID logo  https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9880-1129

Abstract

This article examines common features in Swift, Pope and Sterne’s responses to Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and the wider humoral tradition. It documents the willingness of Swift and Pope simultaneously to take the latter discourse seriously—even to value humoral delusion—and yet to satirize its explanatory pretensions and the behavioural states it postulates; their tendency, also, to take a Janus-faced view of associated kinds of madness, affirming and deriding these concurrently. Sterne then recapitulates that stance in assuming a double perspective on hobby-horsical tendencies, and he combines this with a feel for the pathos and yet also delight which accompany the inevitable failure of Tristram Shandy’s encyclopaedic pretensions. Swift and Sterne especially derive these dual perspectives from qualities incipient in the Anatomy, qualities which Burton had kept in check. In that respect, they (with Pope) transform humoral thinking into a sceptical resource, finding in it material supportive of an ironizing mind-set that willingly entertains multiple contradictory ideas at once. Such sceptical perspectivism is, I argue, characteristic of all three eighteenth-century authors discussed here and highlights their anticipation of Romantic irony.

Description

Keywords

English literature, 1600-1699, Burton, Robert(1577-1640), prose, <i>The Anatomy of Melancholy</i>(1621), Swift, Jonathan(1667-1745), 0000 0001 2121 4321, <i>A Tale of a Tub</i>(1704), Pope, Alexander(1688-1744), 0000 0001 2096 2432, <i>The Rape of the Lock</i>(1712), Sterne, Laurence(1713-1768), 0000 0004 4646 1697, <i>Tristram Shandy</i>(1760-1767), satire, skepticism, melancholy, Irish literature, 1700-1799, fiction, poetry, novel

Journal Title

The Review of English Studies

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

0034-6551
1471-6968

Volume Title

68

Publisher

Oxford University Press