Abstract

The central claim of this dissertation is that Pope confronts skeptical problems in his poetry to engage the intellectual and cultural paradoxes at the heart of modernity. In this, he participates in a wider post-Renaissance movement that defines aesthetic experience as the approaching of the unknowable, exemplified by the je ne sais quoi, the sublime, and affiliated notions gaining prevalence through his century, Pope seeks to harmonize poetry thus radically conceived, however, with more epistemologically confident discourses, especially that of civic political virtue--a task to which he finds ancient skepticism, with its conservative, self-disciplinary agenda, especially congenial. I thus account for the polarity in Pope's literary sympathies, between "Augustan" order and protean modern energies, which critics have considered his work's most important feature. Skepticism produces a tension that Pope finds alternately self-stabilizing and intolerable--his ambivalence to modernity that establishes his unique position in the English poetic canon. ;Further, I contend that Pope's skepticism introduces a deep uncertainty into his poetry about its meanings, their fixity, and their relation to his intentions. But my approach differs from a typically deconstructive one insofar as I stress the concrete historical and philosophical contexts that inspire and constrain this uncertainty. Among many guides, Stanley Cavell's work informs my theoretical understanding of skepticism, while I follow Richard Popkin's discussion of skepticism's role in forming modern thought, and J. G. A. Pocock's account of the political-ideological influence of ancient models of virtue in the eighteenth century. ;Each chapter shows how Pope aesthetically valorizes the doubts raised by a different skeptical problem. The first focuses on the Essay on Man's juggling of sublime, Pascalian questions about our capacity to know the universe with confident, theodicean appraisals of it. Chapter two discusses the Moral Essays' invention of a new portraiture to reconcile the inscrutability of others with ethical judgment. My third shows how Pope cultivates doubts about his own identity in the Imitations of Horace to present an ideal of depersonalized authorship. And my last considers the Dunciad's realization that a skeptically conditioned aesthetic cannot but engulf all regions of cultural value