Arguments of Augustan Wit

203 Pages·2007·5.34 MB·English

by  Professor John Sitter

The comic and satiric literature of the period from the 1670s to the 1740s
is characterized by the allusive and elusive word play of Augustan wit.
The arguments of Augustan wit reveal preoccupations with the
metaphorical dimension of language so distrusted by Locke and others who
saw it as fundamentally opposed to the rational mode of judgment. John
Sitter makes a challenging claim for the importance of wit in the writings
of Dryden, Rochester, Prior, Berkeley, Gay, Pope, and Swift, as an
analytic mode as well as one of stylistic sophistication. He argues that wit
- often regarded by modern critics as a quaint category of verbal
cleverness - in fact offers to current literary theory a legacy corrective of
Romantic and neo-Romantic idealizations of imagination.
This study works at once to emphasize the historical specificity of
Augustan writing and to bring its arguments into dialogue with those of our
time. Shared preoccupations of the two eras include the competing claims
of the quests for "universal" truths and the pursuit of cultural (temporal
and regional) particularity. By urging a reconsideration of the priority
modern criticism has given to post-Augustan values and assumptions, this
book offers a new map of deceptively familiar territory, both in the
eighteenth century and in our own.

Arguments of Augustan wit
CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY
ENGLISH LITERATURE AND THOUGHT
General Editors: Dr HOWARD ERSKINE-HILL, Litt.D., FBA, Pembroke College,
Cambridge
and Professor JOHN RICHETTI, University of Pennsylvania
Editorial Board: Morris Brownell, University of Nevada
Leopold Damrosch, Harvard University
J. Paul Hunter, University of Chicago
Isobel Grundy, University of Alberta
Lawrence Lipking, Northwestern University
Harold Love, Monash University
Claude Rawson, Tale University
Pat Rogers, University of South Florida
James Sambrook, University of Southampton
Titles published
The Transformation of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
by David Womersley
Women's Place in Pope's World
by Valerie Rumbold
Sterne's Fiction and the Double Principle
by Jonathan Lamb
Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650-1850
by Dianne Dugaw
The Body in Swift and Defoe
by Carol Flynn
The Rhetoric of Berkeley's Philosophy
by Peter Walmsley
Space and the Eighteenth-Century English Novel
by Simon Varey
Reason, Grace and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England,
1660-1780
Volume I Whichcote to Wesley
by Isabel Rivers
Defoe's Politics: Parliament, Power, Kingship and Robinson Crusoe
by Manuel Schonhorn
Sentimental Comedy: Theory & Practice
by Frank Ellis
Arguments of Augustan Wit
by John Sitter
Arguments of Augustan wit
JOHN SITTER
Professor of English, Emory University
The right of the
University of Cambridge
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since 1584.
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
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Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521411202
© Cambridge University Press 1991
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 1991
This digitally printed version 2007
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
Sitter, John E.
Arguments of Augustan wit/John Sitter.
p. cm. — (Cambridge studies in eighteenth-century English
literature and thought)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-521-41120-3 (hardcover)
1. English wit and humour - History and criticism. 2. English
literature — 18th century — History and criticism. 3. English
literature — Early modern. 1500—1700 — History and criticism.
4. English literature — Roman influences. I. Title. II. Series.
PR935.S58 1991
827'.409-dc20 90-28116 CIP
ISBN 978-0-521-41120-2 hardback
ISBN 978-0-521-04455-4 paperback
To Deborah, Zak, Amelia, and Ben, for encouraging,
enabling, enduring

Contents
Acknowledgments page xi
Abbreviations xiii
Introduction 1
1 The character progress as an Augustan phenomenon 6
A spectrum of examples 8
Swift's progresses 11
Pleasures of predictability 22
Booth's passion, Locke's will, Prior's Predestination 32
Prose character progresses and the novel: Swift and
Fielding 39
From the gallows 45
2 About wit: Locke, Jakobson, and Augustan ideas 49
Wit and judgment in Locke 51
Addison, Prior and Locke's dichotomy 62
Wit vs. judgment, metaphor vs. metonymy 71
Wit writing and wit written 77
3 On the matter of wit 89
Wit's body and bodies 91
Mechanical operations 97
Big bodies and little bodies (Swift, Gay, Pope) 101
The sylphs as the image of wit 114
4 Gravity, abstraction, and crackpot materialism 125
Gravity and the fall into abstraction 125
Delusions of a partial skepticism: Shaftesbury and A Tale
of a Tub 131
Abstraction from the body in Pope and Prior 138
The "Doctrine of Abstraction ": Berkeley and book iii
of Gulliver's Travels 143
Crackpot materialism 153