Şüpheli kurgular: İngiliz edebiyat kanonunda septik mizah, 1379-1767

This thesis aims at exploring the meaning(s) of humoristic scepticism in the English literary canon from the late middle ages to mid-eighteenth century in a literary nominalist context. The primary argument is that humour is a human capability, and accordingly the first chapter evaluates its ontological roots in Ionian philosophy, its medical reception in the Hippocratic doctors' writings, and its cognitive implications in Aristotelian and post-Aristotelian contexts. The second chapter abandons an essentialist approach to English humour and instead draws on the point that when approached as a cognitive capacity, humour particularly unfolds its sceptical potentials in the context of English humour which, it will be argued, implies a direct continuity between the English use of humour and the sceptic thought and imagination. In accordance, the following chapters will examine the humorous meaning-making processes in Chaucer's House of Fame, Ben Jonson's Every Man in His Humour and Every Man out of His Humour, and Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy. In these chapters, it will be maintained that these texts emerge as literary reflections upon the epistemological crises of their own times and that they reject, disregard, and dismantle cultural, social, and mental universals. By doing so, it will be argued that their multiply contingent, non-discursive, and unstable modes of narration portray an underlying epistemic scepticism and that they turn to humour to express this scepticism. In conclusion, it will be maintained that as a cognitive capacity, humour holds the potential to convey the sceptical tendencies of the human mind and that English humour develops this sceptical potential in humour from a consistently nominalist perspective. The importance of this point, it will be concluded, lies in the fact that English humour literature does not re-produce an essential English humour but produces humour's sceptical potentials in the unique context of the English literary canon and that its sceptical humour showcases an undivided attention to nominal particularities rather than looking up to universal abstractions to understand being and existence.