By the late eighteenth century, the sublime had moved beyond its original association with rhetoric and, increasingly, came to signify awe and disquiet in the face of grand natural phenomena. Evidence for this association was Goethe's essay “Von Deutscher Baukunst” (1772). In it, the cathedral in Strassburg is analogized to a monstrous—at first glance, anyway—irregular work of nature. Besides portraying the compelling effect on the imagination of such grandeur, Goethe's essay also exemplifies the way in which two separate discourses—that of the sublime and that of “mountain appreciation”— intersected and changed the direction of literature and art, from neoclassical, objective standards in emulation of the ancients, to individual, subjective taste—to “aesthetics.”

While acknowledged as precursors of Sturm und Drang and for their roles in the “paradigm change” in German letters at midcentury, the Swiss writer Johann Jacob Bodmer and his literary partner, Johann Jacob Breitinger, are now being more closely examined in connection with this transformation of the sublime. Two articles by Marilyn Torbruegge, published in 1971 and 1972, inaugurated this scholarship. Concerning “the many ponderings on the sublime” in the course of the eighteenth century, she pointed out that “the most marked developments involve an intensification of interest in psychological and philosophical considerations, a gradual distinction between the sublime and the beautiful, and a growing concern with ideas of turbulence or terror, aside from the prevalent reflections on greatness or grandeur, leading ultimately to the twofold division of the sublime into categories of dynamic force and spatial magnitude.