Cleo Protokhristova

The Enlightenment’s “Nosology” –
Laughter and Subversiveness

The paper is concerned with the striking abundance of nose images in the literature of the 18th century and their ambivalent relatedness to the carnavalesque imagery. Focused on Sterne’s Slawkenbergius’s Tale from The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy Gentleman and considering evidences such as Voltaire’s Candide and Zadig, it explores also the tradition of literary thematizing of noses in a wider historical perspective. The assumption suggested is that during the Enlightenment the literary interpretation of noses played a clearly expressed subversive role in relation to the official ideological bias and it was during the same 18th century that literary “nosology” took a specific turn that predetermined significant thematic developments in later European literature.