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69 olution of enquiry.’’ Similarly, in Rasselas the belated ‘‘invocation of a religious perspective determines nothing.’’ For Mr. Parker, the sceptical Johnson is best revealed in the tendency of his writing to balance alternative positions: ‘‘When it shall be found that much is omitted, let it not be forgotten that much is likewise performed.’’ Clearly such self-consuming formulations illuminate Beckett’s admiration for Johnson, but where Beckett’s scepticism is radical Johnson’s is mitigated and constructive. For Johnson, as for Montaigne and Burton before him, a measured and sceptical rehearsal of the vanity of human wishes best prepares the ground for faith and acts as its strongest argument. The modern, secular reader will inevitably prefer the hundred odd pages of Rasselas before we are directed toward the ‘‘choice of eternity,’’ but Johnson presents the choice at the end of the quest not as a perfunctory gesture, but because for him Providence alone offers an answer to the otherwise crushing questions raised by the sceptical mind. ‘‘It was not possible for eighteenthcentury scepticism to follow Bayle,’’ writes Mr. Parker, in ‘‘reasoning as boldly as the freest thinker of the Enlightenment , while regarding Christian faith, in the manner of an earlier age, as an irreducible fact of life.’’ Tellingly, it is to Gibbon that Mr. Parker turns to confirm his point. Yet Gibbon and Hume are surely the exceptions, while the likes of Swift, Johnson, and indeed Sterne, writing in the Erasmian tradition of Christian scepticism did indeed follow Bayle in a form of fideism in which the moralist and the sceptic are united. Having ruled out a scepticism which serves faith, and unwilling to look outside Tristram Shandy’s imagined world to its informing contexts, Mr. Parker struggles to illuminate Sterne’s sceptical thinking. Arguing that Shandeism is the equivalent of Hume’s ‘‘current of nature,’’ he remains doubtful about the ‘‘worth’’ of a way of seeing that conceives a ‘‘play of consciousness in which . . . nothing is consequential, and which seems capable of subduing all experience to its own quality.’’ Yet this is to read Sterne as if he were somehow endorsing and recommending the solipsistic tendencies of a Toby or a Walter and to ignore the many tangible (and extra-textual) referents of Sterne’s satire . Clearly Sterne is as sceptical as Montaigne or Locke about the limits of human understanding, and the digressive , anti-teleological form of Tristram Shandy enacts this scepticism, but the Shandy brothers are surely casualties of dogmatism rather than a solution to its vexations. In lively and engaging readings, Scepticism and Literature shows how sceptical discourse informs the writing of Hume and Sterne, as well as that of less likely figures, such as Pope and Johnson. By choosing to sever literary analysis from the history of ideas, however , Mr. Parker only tells part of the story. J. T. Parnell Goldsmiths College, University of London DAVID MAZELLA. The Making of Modern Cynicism. Charlottesville: Virginia, 2007. Pp. xi ⫹ 305. $35. Johnson wrote, ‘‘The natural flight of the human mind is not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.’’ Mr. Mazella, explaining why the contemporary view of cynicism is universal- 70 ly pejorative, argues that ‘‘Cynics are feared because they threaten the public with a genuinely worrying prospect, a future without hope of meaningful change. At the very least, cynics foresee a future in which individuals have little chance of fixing their problems or improving their conditions in life or at work.’’ With fourth century BC philosopher Diogenes of Sinope as his terminus a quo, Mr. Mazella surveys the protean nature of the word and its concomitant meanings through its manifestations in, especially, Shakespeare (Timon of Athens), Davenant, Lyttelton, Rousseau , Burke, Isaac D’Israeli, Wilde, and Foucault. Foucault also provides modern context for Mr. Mazella’s approach, as do a plethora of contemporary social historians, especially Theodor Adorno, Alan Keenan, and William Chaloupka. Readers of the Scriblerian may be most interested in the third chapter (‘‘From Rude Cynics to ‘Cynical Revilers’’’), with its specific discussions of Davenant, Shaftesbury, Fielding, and Lyttelton, ‘‘when the breakup of rhetoric reduced Diogenes and Cynic philosophy to burlesque figures, doubly displaced parodies of a once-robust philosophy .’’ Diogenes is...

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