The Sublime
A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory

This anthology makes many key eighteenth-century texts on the Sublime readily available for the first time.

Andrew Ashfield (Edited by), Peter de Bolla (Edited by)

9780521395823, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 15 August 1996

328 pages
22.6 x 15 x 2.3 cm, 0.52 kg

This collection of texts on the Sublime provides the historical context for the foundation and discussion of one of the most important aesthetic debates of the Enlightenment. The significance of the Sublime in the eighteenth century ranged across a number of fields - literary criticism, empirical psychology, political economy, connoisseurship, landscape design and aesthetics, painting and the fine arts, and moral philosophy - and has continued to animate aesthetic and theoretical debates to this day. However, the unavailability of many of the crucial texts of the founding tradition has resulted in a conception of the Sublime often limited to the definitions of its most famous theorist Edmund Burke. Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla's anthology, which includes an introduction and notes to each entry, offers students and scholars ready access to a much deeper and more complex tradition of writings on the Sublime, many of them never before printed in modern editions.

Introduction
1. The longinian tradition
2. Rhapsody to rhetoric
3. Irish perspectives
4. The Aberdonian Enlightenment
5. Glasgow and Edinburgh
6. From the picturesque to the political
Commentary notes
Sources and further reading.

Subject Areas: Literary essays [DNF]