This paper examines the use of irony in Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy in relation to the Anglican doctrine of original sin. Many critics have discussed the frequent use of sexual irony in Journey; however, few have acknowledged that Yorick's enthusiastic endorsements of physical desires that frequently follow remarks loaded with sexual innuendo make the clerical first-person narrator an object of religious irony. Most notably, in his famous invocation of “Dear Sensibility” at the end of “The Bourbonnois”, Yorick's ineptitude as a clergy is ironically revealed when he rapturously argues that he can directly 'sense' God's presence through his own physical sensibility, thus violating the Anglican doctrine of original sin that emphasizes the fallen nature of the human body. Important is the fact that the irony in this invocation also discloses the rigidity of the Anglican view of the tainted human body, which forces the reader who subscribes to the teaching to interpret Yorick's embrace of physical desire as inadequate and even blasphemous. In other words, the religious irony in the invocation intimates a sense of discontent with the Anglican teaching on the degeneracy of physical desires, which dissatisfaction suffuses the narrative and hinders its tone from settling as either comfortably sentimental or playfully ironical. The disconnect between the affable ambience created by multiple sentimental conventions and the religious discontentment revealed in the invocation's irony is one of the sources behind the infamous tonal instability of Sterne's novel.

This paper explores the way in which Percy Bysshe Shelley contributes to the reform movement through his satiric attack upon the poetic authority for which William Wordsworth supposedly claims in Peter Bell. Among parodies of Wordsworth's poem are John Hamilton Reynolds' Peter Bell: A Lyrical Ballad published a week before Wordsworth's work was printed in April 1819 and Shelley's Peter Bell the Third composed in October 1819. In particular, Shelley critiques not only Wordsworth's conservatism but his poetic failure by identifying Peter Bell with his creator. It was in the wake of the Peterloo Massacre that Shelley condemns Wordsworth and his works for condoning state violence although Peter Bell was originally composed in 1798 along with Lyrical Ballads. This paper argues that through his satiric rewriting of Peter Bell Shelley deconstructs Wordsworth's poetic authority and consequently disguises the seemingly legitimate succession to the Lake poet. Shelley's attempt to demonize and confine Wordsworth to a traitor ironically exposes the very paradox of cancelling out the distinction between subject and object of satirizing, ending up with the generic limits of satire. Nonetheless, Shelley's purpose to mock Wordsworth by declaring the untimely death of the elder poet underscores the responsibility that poets take especially when faced with social crises. Hence, Shelley's overarching project is contingent upon the idea of reform as opposed to the docile attitude that conforms to the dominant ideology, whether it is literary, religious or political.

J. G. A. Pocock's Barbarism and Religion (Hereafter, BR) and other related essays aim to rewrite Enlightenment historiography, among other things, by examining the rise and development of English Enlightenment over the course of the eighteenth century. Challenging the traditional literature that has rejected its existence altogether as an equivalent of the continental Enlightenment movement, Pocock argues that English Enlightenment took the form of the antithesis of enthusiasm, a phenomenon associated with Protestant dissenters in post-Restoration England. Close examination of his oeuvre, however, helps to dispute this thesis on the basis of the following. First, Pocock conflates two conflicting enterprises in BR: namely, the task of contextualizing Gibbon's history writing in relevant, broader European contexts and that of locating the ideological stratum of what can be termed as English Enlightenment. Invaluable as they are, the two projects are mutually exclusive, failing to culminate in a coherent narrative. BR must be either a contribution to the history of historiography, as it claims, or one to Enlightenment historiography; Pocock attempts both, but what his work ends up being is not so much the latter as the former. Second, while adequately historicizing Enlightened narratives by Edward Gibbon in BR, Pocock fails to historicize the idea of enthusiasm properly, deducing from its antagonists that they collectively form the English version of Enlightenment movement; however, the resultant intellectual landscape is too simplistic to explain the varieties of contemporary historical discourses effectively. Essentializing enthusiasm as the antiself of Enlightenment may be the culprit, because Enlightenment may not always be the antiself of enthusiasm historically. (258 words)

In The History of Sir George Ellison (1766), Sarah Robinson Scott extends the prequel A Description of Millenium Hall (1762)'s discussion about restoring virtue amidst the advances of a liberal commercial society. If in the prequel Scott demonstrates virtue in a female community detached from the corrupted economic realm, she confronts the rampant economic rationale head on in Sir George Ellison to test the viability of her proposed virtue. This paper investigates the novel's opening Jamaica sequence which centers on the virtuous protagonist George Ellison's problematization of colonial slavery and his efforts to reform the inhumanity and cruelty on the Jamaica slave plantation. Many critics focus on Ellison's failure to actualize abolition and thereby dismiss Ellison's antislavery didacticism to collapse in the face of economic interests. I seek to reconsider the Jamaica sequence in the context of the pre-abolition period in which the novel is dealing with slavery and of Scott's larger novelistic endeavor to demonstrate a virtue that can effectually curtail economic motivations. This article first delves into the novel's philosophical discussion about Evangelical stewardship, which the prequel's ending briefly discloses as the motivation for virtue, prompted by Ellison's divergence from colonial mentality. Upon establishing that Ellison is motivated not by self-interest but Evangelical stewardship, this paper further elucidates his reformative meaures' radical repositioning of slaves to ultimately assume the status of free servants within a colonial plantation. In so doing, I argue that by testing her proposed stewardship-based virtue first and foremost in the heart of commercial empire, wherein the worst atrocities in human history were committed in the name of commercial advancement, Scott effectually establishes Evangelical stewardship as that which can guarantee a truly virtuous England that ultimately reconciles virtue and commerce.