The genesis of authority: Scripture, satire, and interpretation in English literature, 1660-1760

In this thesis, I examine changes in English literary representations of divine authority from 1660 to 1760 and discuss their relation to concurrent developments in scriptural exegesis. From Milton to Smart, literary representations of divine authority undergo profound thematic and generic changes. Thematic changes include a gradually increasing perception that forms of human authority have become discrete from divine authority, dissociation compounded by an increasing sense of human inability to perceive divine authority accurately. Generic changes include a move away from the heroic form and mode toward the satiric: insofar as either genre delineated man's relation to divine authority, epic tends to give way to mock- or satiric epic as the canonical mode in which to represent that relation. I trace the causes of these thematic and generic changes in representations of divine authority to concurrent changes in scriptural exegesis, arguing that changes in scriptural exegesis not only influence thematic methods of representing divine and human authority but provide a background against which to understand the relation between epic and satiric representations of it. The most important of these changes were a new understanding of the historical origin, language, and composition of the scriptural text and a fresh realization of the interpretive problems posed by the Reformation doctrine of sola scriptura.;Seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century scriptural exegesis provides a way of examining changes in representations of divine authority because, in claiming to provide a way of understanding the human and the historical within the terms of the divine and the transhistorical, it attempts to articulate the link between the divine and human realms. Perhaps more than at any other time since then, English history, philosophy, theology, and literature were written and debated in terms drawn from contemporary debates over the nature of the scriptural text. This study analyzes one branch of that debate, the literary consequences of changes in the exegesis and perceived authority of the scriptural text.