Lucan and the Sublime
Power, Representation and Aesthetic Experience

Argues that Lucan's Bellum Civile is a central text in the history of the sublime.

Henry J. M. Day (Author)

9781107020603, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 24 January 2013

271 pages
22.2 x 14.5 x 2.2 cm, 0.46 kg

This is the first comprehensive study of the sublime in Lucan. Drawing upon renewed literary-critical interest in the tradition of philosophical aesthetics, Henry Day argues that the category of the sublime offers a means of moving beyond readings of Lucan's Bellum Civile in terms of the poem's political commitment or, alternatively, nihilism. Demonstrating in dialogue with theorists from Burke and Kant to Freud, Lyotard and Ankersmit the continuing vitality of Longinus' foundational treatise On the Sublime, Day charts Lucan's complex and instructive exploration of the relationship between sublimity and ethical discourses of freedom and oppression. Through the Bellum Civile's cataclysmic vision of civil war and metapoetic accounts of its own genesis, through its heated linguistic texture and proclaimed effects upon future readers and, most powerfully of all, through its representation of its twin protagonists Caesar and Pompey, Lucan's great epic emerges as a central text in the history of the sublime.

Introduction
1. The experience of the sublime
2. Representation, the sublime and the Bellum Civile
3. The Caesarian sublime
4. The Pompeian sublime
Epilogue.

Subject Areas: Philosophy: aesthetics [HPN], Classical history / classical civilisation [HBLA1], Ancient history: to c 500 CE [HBLA], Literary studies: classical, early & medieval [DSBB], Literature: history & criticism [DS], Literature & literary studies [D]