Abstract

The present monograph attempts to prove the essential affinity and contemporaneity of Samuel Johnson and Laurence Sterne. The attempt presents itself, negatively, as a critique of the conventional demarcation made in literary history between Johnson as one of the last Augustans and Sterne as one of the first pre-Romantics, and also of a similar demarcation duplicated in art history between Joshua Reynolds and William Hogarth. More positively, it is an attempt to restore the fundamental unity of these writers and painters within their own shared historical milieu. This requires an endeavor not only at a redefinition of a middle period between the Augustan and the Romantic periods in English literary history, but, more broadly, at a radical revision of the cultural map of the second half of the eighteenth century within the context of the European Enlightenment. ;The common milieu in which Johnson and Sterne, Reynolds and Hogarth, should be placed together is a mental space delimited by such key concepts as Pope's "the isthmus of a middle state," Locke's "historical, plain method," Hume's "science of Human Nature," and Burke's "logic of Taste." These systems, religious, moral, philosophical, and aesthetic, present each a total vision of the universal human condition, including temporality and historicity. In each of such visions, however, the relationship between system and history remains ambivalent. Within their shared vision of humanity, Johnson and Sterne, along with Reynolds and Hogarth, present different versions of their own highly individual and yet fundamentally similar experience of the dynamic and often quite ambivalent relationship between system and history, universality and individuality, eternity and mortality. Johnson's Dictionary, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and Rasselas, Sterne's Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey, Reynolds' and Hogarth's artistic theories and practice--these are all testimonies of the same vision of humanity as it was held in the second half of the eighteenth century, a vision of Human Nature, which has internalized and historicized the Classical/Augustan notion of Nature, and yet resists dissolving its criterion of universal, public and social validity into the Modern/Romantic notion of creative, private and individual "truth."