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

Abstract The sublime converges with various types of skepticism in late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth-century British thought to disrupt or trouble the period’s aesthetics, epistemology, and ideology in ways that have not been fully recognized. After Boileau’s French translation of Longinus’s On the Sublime brings the idea into European criticism in 1674, British writers attuned to the sublime’s skeptical implications produce an account of it different not only from that of Longinus but from those of Burke and Kant later in the eighteenth century, as well as from the major theories of sublimity developed in literary studies from the 1970s to today. The convergence of skepticism with the sublime exposes instabilities in the dominant epistemology of the post-Restoration period, which the leading intellectual histories have usually characterized as securely grounded on procedures of probability, sociable collaboration, and “moral certainty”: for a group of important writers, the skeptical sublime notes and dramatizes the occasional instability, alienation, and doubt that attend the age’s cultural projects. It also helps grant the aesthetic ideology of Dryden, Swift, and Pope its peculiar character. The so-called Tory satirists have been seen, in a sometimes muddled way, as both political reactionaries and supporters of new models of taste and civil society associated with the liberal-Whig ascendancy. While these satirists appeal to the protoaesthetic category of the sublime—alongside their Whig associates and enemies—to help stabilize British culture after the traumas of the Civil War and Revolution, they also use it to remark the uncertainties attending such means of stabilization and so to express their ambivalence about the emerging social order.