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3 - The Romantic Sublime

from Part I - Romantic Genealogies (1750–1790)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2024

Patrick Vincent
Affiliation:
Université de Neuchâtel, Switzerland
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Summary

Chapter Three pursues the discussion of aesthetics broached in the previous chapter, focussing on the aesthetic experience most often associated with Romanticism: the Sublime. Contrasting the influential histories of Samuel Holt Monk and Marjorie Nicholson, it argues that no single theory of the sublime dominated the eighteenth century, and that Kant’s influential ‘Analytic of the Sublime’ does not exhaust the term’s many historical meanings, which included the rhetorical sublime, the natural sublime, and the philosophical sublime. The chapter addresses the sublime in a variety of discourses and practices, including landscape gardening, astronomy, gothic fiction, revolutionary politics, language theory and antiquarian texts such as Ossian and the Scandinavian Veddas. It then distinguishes between Burke’s physiological, Kant’s cognitive, Schiller’s moral, and Herder’s more ‘naturalised’ versions of the philosophical sublime, before looking at the rhetorical sublime in Longinus and eighteenth-century language theories, and finally at the natural sublime in landscape aesthetics and in the poetry of Wordsworth, Leopardi, and Mickiewicz. It concludes that academic reconstructions of the Romantic sublime based on Kant have skewed the history of the concept, in particular by legitimating models of Romantic individuality that have excluded women.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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  • The Romantic Sublime
  • Edited by Patrick Vincent, Université de Neuchâtel, Switzerland
  • Book: The Cambridge History of European Romantic Literature
  • Online publication: 10 January 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108683906.004
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  • The Romantic Sublime
  • Edited by Patrick Vincent, Université de Neuchâtel, Switzerland
  • Book: The Cambridge History of European Romantic Literature
  • Online publication: 10 January 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108683906.004
Available formats
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  • The Romantic Sublime
  • Edited by Patrick Vincent, Université de Neuchâtel, Switzerland
  • Book: The Cambridge History of European Romantic Literature
  • Online publication: 10 January 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108683906.004
Available formats
×