This chapter addresses the repeated appearances of the sublime in Clare’s verse – including his deployment of the word itself – as well as the ambivalent relationship Clare’s understanding and practice of the sublime has to eighteenth-century and Romantic aesthetic discourse. This entails consideration of major theorizations of the sublime in the period prior to Clare and the reception in the English tradition of classical conceptions of literary sublimity or ‘grandeur’. The example of Milton is significant here, as is the genre of epic and Clare’s apparent aversion to it. A number of examples from Clare’s poetry and prose are considered in detail. The chapter concludes with a reading of Clare’s famous ‘I am’ poems, suggesting that they do in fact continue the tradition of Milton’s Satan, his resistance to oppression, and ambivalent insistence on the power of the mind.

This chapter examines the irony, complexity, and pleasure in rhetorical ingenuity evident in the satirical essay in English, taking as its central exemplars some of the key historical figures in that tradition in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, from the Irish authors Jonathan Swift and Maria and Richard Lovell Edgeworth through to the Romantic essayists Charles Lamb, Thomas De Quincey, and Thomas Love Peacock. It demonstrates how the prose essay became a powerful satirical form in the Georgian period, and discusses the tonal richness and ambiguity which render the satirical essay a key subgenre in the tradition of the prose essay in English. It pays particular attention to the links between satire, colonialism, the Gothic, and the sublime in the form of the essay.

Aristotle describes the history of poetry (in Poetics 4–5) in terms of a gradual progress, starting from primitive beginnings and concluding with the perfect forms of Attic (classical) drama. Characteristic of this Aristotelian approach to literary history are the notion of gradual progress, the notion of a τέλος, and the suggestion that different historical ideas, authors or genres belong to one coherent process of development. This chapter examines to what extent Aristotle’s approach has informed ancient literary criticism. It is demonstrated that the Aristotelian framework is in different aways adopted by Dionysius of Halicarnassus in his history of early historiograpy (On Thucydides 5–6), and by Demetrius in his history of prose styles (On Style 12–15). Modern histories of (ancient) literature likewise adopt the Aristotelian narrative of progress. The author of On the Sublime, however, contradicts the Aristotelian model: Longinus’ enthusiasm for early authors like Homer, Archilochus and Hecataeus shows that, according to this critic, the history of the sublime is not one of gradual progress from a primitive beginning towards a perfect form in the classical age. Longinus suggests that the sublime was there from the very beginning. The special position of On the Sublime is explained as resulting from a deliberate rejection of Aristotelian principles.

This chapter charts the rise and fall of Virgil’s Carthage to explore some of the ways in which the paradoxical resonances of this city are productive of a sublimity that expresses its ambivalent status in the Aeneid. Under construction in Book 1, Carthage surges up before us offering a glimpse of the city’s glorious Augustan refoundation, but also a vision of the nascent Punic menace that would become Rome’s greatest enemy. In Book 4, Carthage has lapsed into an almost ruinous state threatening imminent collapse, a threat partly realised in the image of the city’s destruction that is a fantasy of its Roman conquest (4.669–70). From the start of the poem, though, it is clear that this city is not just Carthage, it is also Troy and Rome, so the vision of its destruction is not only a reassuring affirmation of Rome’s eventual triumph but a disturbing reminder of vulnerability. Virgil’s paradoxical Carthage encapsulates the Burkean sensation of the sublime ‘delight’ that ‘turns on pain’, its Augustan space sublime and thrillingly unstable.

This chapter considers how nineteenth-century poetry in Australia adapted European conceptualisations of the sublime and the gothic to articulate a literal inability to settle on the land. It argues that settler poetry has a difficulty with being grounded: its representations have a tendency to hover, sublimely, above the surface of the earth; or, if forced under, they refuse to simply die: but live on, as gothic, revenant, voices. It draws on popular and canonical examples like A. B. (Banjo) Paterson’s “The Man from Snowy River” and “Waltzing Matilda,” Adam Lindsay Gordon’s “The Sick Stockrider,” and Mary Gilmore’s “Old Botany Bay,” as well as examples that have been sourced from historical archives.

In recent works on the symbolic significance of artificial beings in literature, the descriptions of humans as puppets or automata have been analyzed in singular terms, signifying people who lack autonomy in action or thought. This chapter demonstrates that in European literature of the early nineteenth century, the puppet and the automaton are used in disparate ways, the former in positive terms as a representation of a being that is in tune with natural forces and the latter in negative terms as a dead being that mindlessly follows the dictates of its programming. Through the examination of both objects in the works of E. T. A. Hoffmann, Jean Paul, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Heinrich von Kleist, George Sand, and Carlo Collodi, the symbolic difference is explained through its connection to the Romantic worldview of the period, which valorized the surrender to higher forces while decrying the mechanization of humanity.

This chapter focuses on some specific features of the historical classic, offering a series of reflections to expand a debate on this complex topic. Based on some examples of the Western historiographical tradition, I discuss to what extent historians should engage the concept of the classic, as has been done for literary and artworks. I will argue that it is possible to identify a category of the classic text in historical writing. Because of their narrative condition, historical texts share some of the features assigned to literary texts such as durability, timelessness, universal meaningfulness, resistance to historical criticism, susceptibility to multiple interpretations, and ability to function as models. Yet, since historical texts do not construct imaginary worlds but try to achieve some realities external to the text, they also have to attain some specific features according to this referential content, such as the surplus of meaning, historical use of metaphors, effect of contemporaneity, and a certain appropriation of ‘literariness’.

This chapter introduces the wide range of music bound up with the sublime in the Romantic period. This is a time often associated with the triumph of music – and especially ‘autonomous’ instrumental music – as the most sublime of the arts, and with a canon of overwhelming, ground-breaking, transgressive works by great (mostly German) composers. These associations are important, not least as a way of understanding the unease and sometimes controversy that has surrounded the musical sublime since the later twentieth century. Yet equally important to understanding the sublime in the Romantic period is to look beyond monumental instrumental compositions to see how smaller-scale genres and vocal music, alongside performers, listeners and other agents, shaped and contested the sublimity of music, sound and hearing, and left an indelible mark on the broader aesthetic category of the sublime itself.

This chapter examines the remarkable growth in the popularity of mountain climbing in Britain during the Romantic period, as adventurous fell-walkers went in search of the sublime. Mountain summits were increasingly seen as the ultimate sublime location and ascent as a near-guaranteed way to experience psychological as well as physical elevation. The chapter explores the links between mountains and the sublime in the period’s aesthetic theories before examining how the literature of British domestic tourism described the sublime pleasures of ascents to British summits. It investigates the relationship between the presentation of sublime experiences on British mountains and those on the higher peaks of the Alps and traces the emergence of Snowdon in Wales, Skiddaw in the Lake District, and Ben Lomond in Scotland as pre-eminent British sublime locations. It shows how, as summits became more crowded, thrill-seeking climbers increasingly ventured to more remote and dangerous locations to experience the sublime.

The Alpine sublime contributed to the Romantic vogue for mountains, but also to the development of Romantic aesthetics and modern subjectivity. This chapter examines a variety of representations of the Alps, including scientific and aesthetic treatises, poems, prose fiction, and painting, as well as more ephemeral documents such as travel journals and visitors’ books. Authors addressed include Rousseau, Ramond, the Duchess of Devonshire, Wordsworth, the Shelleys, Byron, and Ruskin. It argues that the Alpine sublime served as an expression of divine power, human autonomy, and social distinction. Proceeding chronologically, the chapter begins with the Grand Tour, with its scientific, aesthetic, and mythical representations of the Alps, then looks at how the French Revolution appropriated the Alpine sublime, at ways in which Romantic writers responded by making it a private experience, and finally at how tourism helped generalize this modern attitude to mountains.

The Introduction surveys the range and diversity of engagements with the sublime across different areas of enquiry, genres of cultural productivity, and national traditions in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe. It explores the close links between ‘the sublime’ and ‘the Romantic’ in academic discourse before outlining the history of ‘the Romantic Sublime’ as a critical construct. It argues for a potential disconnect between what scholars have called ‘the Romantic Sublime’ and how the sublime might actually have been produced, encountered, experienced, and understood during the Romantic period. A selection of key Romantic-period engagements with the sublime are discussed, as are the major scholarly histories of the topic, from the early twentieth century to the present day.

This chapter explores the extensive discussion of the sublime in eighteenth-century English, Irish and Scottish philosophy, often considered as laying the groundwork for the Romantic sublime. The chapter also examines academic histories of these eighteenth-century discussions of the sublime, showing how such histories have at times over-simplified the relationship between competing philosophical approaches and national traditions. The chapter pays particular attention to the increasing centrality of the association of ideas to descriptions of the sublime in Anglophone philosophy, identifying it as a key marker of difference from the German idealist tradition that has been the focus of so many scholarly accounts of the Romantic sublime.

This chapter considers the early modern ‘prehistory’ of the Romantic sublime. It considers the sublime as a type of experience of the natural world that far preceded its formal articulation, taking as examples the volcanic encounters of the Scottish traveller William Lithgow (c. 1582–c. 1645) and the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680). The natural philosopher Thomas Burnet (c. 1635–1715) has often been identified as an originator of the Romantic sublime; this chapter casts him instead as a lynchpin. He was not the first to ‘see’ the great in nature; instead, his theory challenged the theological foundations of many early modern sublime experiences, paving the way for a theory of the sublime that could move beyond the divine. Above all the chapter argues for the value of the vocabulary of sublime experience to describe encounters with the natural world before the Romantic sublime.

This chapter first walks readers through Kant’s critical theory of the sublime before tracing this Kantian sublime in a selection of German Romantic-period cultural texts. One of Caspar David Friedrich’s most famous paintings, The Monk by the Sea, and Heinrich von Kleist’s equally awesome review of it, are read through a (post-)Kantian lens. The chapter then explains how Kant’s model of the sublime was decisively re-interpreted by Friedrich Schiller, whose idea of the ‘pathetic-sublime’ made the concept amenable to poetics, particularly so with respect to tragedy and questions of free will and fate. The chapter closes with a discussion of the sublime in German Romantic-period music, focusing on Beethoven’s Fidelio and Ninth Symphony, with the words of the final chorus from Schiller’s Ode to Joy.

This chapter shows how, in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Norse gods and the Scandinavian Viking were reimagined and refashioned in poetry, visual art, and music drama in accordance with Burke’s ideas of the sublime. Coinciding temporally with Burke’s Enquiry, the revival of interest in Old Norse and medieval Scandinavian poetry furnished poets and artists with a new mythology as an alternative to classical Greek and Roman mythology. This chapter argues that the aesthetics of the sublime, as a challenge to neoclassical standards, encouraged an expansion of the poetical canon, allowing for the inclusion of ancient Scandinavian poetry, which the previous generation had scorned as rough and barbaric, and furthermore provided a new verbal and visual idiom in which this poetry could be recreated for a contemporary audience.

This chapter models the use of digital humanities methodologies to study semantic history. Corpus analysis and geographical information systems techniques are applied to trace the use of the word ‘sublime’ in a large collection of digitized literary works from the final decade of the nineteenth century. This collection, which comprises nearly 10,000 texts from the 1890s, was extracted from the British Library’s Nineteenth-Century Books Corpus. The chapter explains the steps involved in extracting and analyzing this portion of the corpus. It then presents a case study focused on the contexts, meanings, and locations associated with the word ’sublime’ in literary works from the 1890s. This case study tests a hypothesis derived by consulting the Oxford English Dictionary, which suggests that by the end of the nineteenth century, ‘sublime’ was often used unsystematically as an intensifier, as a word for labeling any experience or phenomena that defied description.

‘The Arctic sublime’ was a Romantic subcategory in its own right because of the period’s fascination with Arctic vastness and awe-inspiring icescapes. This chapter examines some of the famous representations of the Arctic sublime, including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Das Eismeer, but also lesser-known texts that illustrate the intense contemporary engagement with northern climes. The sources that were available to the public and helped create an image of the Arctic were not only literary or artistic representations but also travel accounts and stories of shipwrecks. The chapter traces the patriotic celebrations of explorers braving the deadly terrors of the Arctic as well the discourse that developed around the optical mirages and illusions in high latitudes. The latter are particularly pertinent as they fitted into a Burkean sense of sublime psychological disruption and disorientation. The chapter shows how the public could – virtually – occupy the Arctic and experience the thrill of its sublime landscapes in books and at exhibitions, while the actual Arctic remained enigmatic and unconquerable.

This chapter examines the reception of philosophies of the sublime in European painting of the Romantic period. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, many painters took up subjects that echo descriptions of the sublime offered by Burke, Kant, and other philosophers, prompted by art critics who attempted to apply the idea of the sublime to art. The chapter focuses on artists who engaged with three facets of the sublime that had become recurrent concerns of British and German philosophical aesthetics: (1) vastness, captured in landscapes of towering mountains and the open ocean; (2) power, expressed through the imagery of volcanic eruptions and other natural disasters; and (3) violence, depicted in paintings of animal conflict.

This chapter considers the uses of sublime blockage for science. The sublime was, on the one hand, a prod for precision and, on the other hand, a nod to skepticism and mystery, potentially ennobling an otherwise mechanical science. The chapter shows how astronomers, biologists, chemists, electricians, and natural historians and neurologists exploited sublime blockage either to elevate science above crude mechanism or butchery or to engage in skepticism so that it could arguably further scientific research. Such engagement with blockage paved the way for Franz Anton Mesmer’s quackery along with Benjamin Franklin’s efforts to defeat it, but quackery proved to be a more robust foe than anticipated.