The importance of James Noggle's fine study lies both in its challenge to our expectations of where we are likely to encounter the sublime, and in its realignment of the trope's philosophical affiliations ... This study ends with a compelling discussion of the final Dunciad.

• 1: Introduction: The Skeptical Sublime - Aesthetic Ideology in Pope and the Tory Satirists 2: The Abyss of Reason: Rochester, Dryden, and the Skeptical Origins of Sublimity 3: Civil Enthusiasm in A Tale of a Tub 4: The Public Universe: An Essay on Man and the Limits of the Sublime Tradition 5: Pope's mitations of Horace and the Authority of Inconsistency 6: Knowing Ridicule and Skeptical Reflection in the Moral Essays 7: Modernity and the Skeptical Sublime in the Final Dunciad Notes Bibliography Index

The importance of James Noggle's fine study lies both in its challenge to our expectations of where we are likely to encounter the sublime, and in its realignment of the trope's philosophical affiliations ... This study ends with a compelling discussion of the final Dunciad.

• 1: Introduction: The Skeptical Sublime - Aesthetic Ideology in Pope and the Tory Satirists 2: The Abyss of Reason: Rochester, Dryden, and the Skeptical Origins of Sublimity 3: Civil Enthusiasm in A Tale of a Tub 4: The Public Universe: An Essay on Man and the Limits of the Sublime Tradition 5: Pope's mitations of Horace and the Authority of Inconsistency 6: Knowing Ridicule and Skeptical Reflection in the Moral Essays 7: Modernity and the Skeptical Sublime in the Final Dunciad Notes Bibliography Index