Sceptical Perspectives on Melancholy: Burton, Swift, Pope, Sterne
Accepted version
Peer-reviewed
Repository URI
Repository DOI
Change log
Authors
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
Journal Title
Conference Name
Journal ISSN
1471-6968