This chapter deals with a rarity in Romantic literature: the sublime body. While landscapes tended to be seen as sublime, as outpourings of ever-growing philosophical minds, bodies were more often than not belittled and considered as insignificant husks. While eighteenth-century literature introduced the priapistic sublime into erotic novels, thus juxtaposing demure sentimentality with the burlesque gigantism of the homme machine’s genitals, Romantic poets opened “workshop[s] of filthy creation” where philosophical minds seem to unleash bodies that combine the sublime with the monstrous. Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein, thus, impregnated by the sexualized voices of his Ingolstadt professors, gives birth to a grotesque abortion, whereas a generation before Matthew Gregory Lewis had shown what happens when an abbot’s mind loses control and – in an unparalleled example of Romantic hagio-porn – transforms a Madonna lactans into a Mephistophelean abettor to the devil. Byron even goes a step further when he imagines man’s existence as a voyage on a gargantuan female body, constantly threatened by the jaws of a vagina dentata.

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.

This chapter opens by considering the vexed relationship between Romantic poetic practices that were increasingly interested in the powers and perceptions of individuals and the Romantic period’s burgeoning metropolitan profusion. The first sections explore the ambivalent or outright negative attitudes towards cities and their populations expressed by poets such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey and considers how distancing perspectives are employed in writings by Walter Scott and Letitia Landon. The later parts of the essay consider alternative versions of the urban sublime, touching on topographical and statistical representations by Thomas Malton and Patrick Colquhoun; celebrations of multiplicity by Pierce Egan and William Hazlitt; readings against the grain by Charles Baudelaire, Thomas De Quincey and Charles Lamb; and considerations of ruination by John Martin, Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Mary Shelley.

This chapter examines the influence of William Bartram´s Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida on the writing of Wordsworth and Coleridge in the 1790s and highlights the uniqueness of Bartram´s eco-centric approach to sublimity in early American thinking about the natural world. A practiced botanist and natural illustrator, Bartram delights in cataloguing plant and animal lives, but the Travels also offers a significant intervention into trans-Atlantic discourses of sublimity. Bartram´s sublime overwhelms the perceiver with plentitude rather than terror, and he narrates experiences of sublimity from amidst the rich life he delights to describe rather than at a distance. He emphasizes continuity between human and more-than-human lives. Bartram also resists the nationalistic orientation of his American contemporaries, attending to native and local epistemologies. The chapter concludes with comparisons between passages of the Travels, Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” and Wordsworth’s “Ruth.”

This chapter traces the use of the sublime in ancient Greek and Latin literature from Homer through Augustine. Starting from the basic premise that the study of the classical sublime cannot be restricted to a reading of Longinus, it demonstrates that the sublime was a recognizable phenomenon, an ethical stance, a marker of ideology and value, and a topic of debate from at least the fifth century BCE. Ancient writers make sublime spectacles out of practically anything, from the starry sky to the gemstone, from monumental architecture to architectural ruins. Numerous texts imbue human subjects, such as mythological figures and natural philosophers, with a greatness of soul that electrifies readers with the thrill of the sublime, and when such figures falter or collapse, their fall from greatness is equally spectacular. The chapter concludes with a sample of texts that reject or problematize the value of the sublime or that police its use.

This chapter explores the genealogy of the phrase ‘from the sublime to the ridiculous’, tracing the saying from Romantic period attributions to Thomas Paine and Napoleon back to seventeenth-century debates about the sublime as a literary style. Ridiculousness haunts sublimity from Longinus’s discussions of the comic in his treatise to Kant’s consideration of humour as an affect uncannily akin to the sublime. Returning to Romantic period theorizations of the ridiculous, the chapter considers Jean Paul Richter’s aesthetics and his influence on S. T. Coleridge’s thinking about humour as providing alternative perspectives on key Romantic concepts including our relationship to nature, society, and childhood.

Very few ancient Greek authors were read in any form in the Latin West during the Middle Ages. Though hugely popular in antiquity – and in Byzantium – Plutarch’s works are no exception to this. When the early Italian Renaissance humanists permanently changed the course of Greek studies in the West, Plutarch became one of the most widely read authors of the period. This chapter will discuss how Plutarch’s name first began to resurface in twelfth-century Latin writers, how he was among the earliest Greek writers to be translated into the modern vernaculars, and how, in a long series of Latin translations, the Parallel Lives became bestsellers in the fifteenth century. The chapter will also discuss how his works influenced Renaissance ideas about ethics and political thought.

This chapter examines the transmission of Plutarch’s works from late antiquity to the fourteenth century and then looks at some striking examples of his appropriation. Although in the early centuries of this period over half his works were lost, a key factor ensuring the survival of the rest was the fact that their moral outlook was so compatible with that of orthodox Christianity. The watershed moment comes in the thirteenth century when Maximus Planudes devoted himself to collecting and copying the still existing works. Among the examples provided here to show his works were being closely read are the use Photius makes of them in his Bibliotheca; the influence of the structure and purpose of the Lives on the scholars at the court of Constantine VII Porphyrogenitos and later on Michael Psellos; Anna Komnena’s knowledge of various Moralia treatises; and Theodorus Metochites’ self-fashioning as an early-fourteenth-century Plutarch.

The vision of the Republic that emerges from Shakespeare’s plays is a tragic one: fought over and lost in Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra; perhaps, in Coriolanus, just too hard to live with. At the end of Shakespeare’s dramatic career, he left all this behind, and he returned to a fanciful, allusive use of Plutarch – the Greek Lives, rather than the Roman. We find Plutarchan names cut loose from their histories: Pericles, Prince of Tyre (in the sources the character was called “Apollonius”); Cleomenes and Dion, courtiers in The Winter’s Tale. In the last play of all, the collaboratively written Two Noble Kinsmen, Duke Theseus returns, together with the Cretan labyrinth: the play suddenly, decisively echoes North’s wording from the Theseus. Plutarch has ceased to be a deep “source”; he is now, again, a fund to dip into, a resource; perhaps, by this time, an old friend.

The Introduction situates Plutarch in his literary context, as a vivid and original thinker and writer whose popularity remains enormous, as well as his historical context as an innovator in the writing of biography. Some authors discuss Plutarch’s role in the development of the biographical tradition and his relationship to the classical Greek past. Others examine his Roman context as a Greek living in an occupied country, and his views on politics, particularly those involving barbarians or "others." Multiple essays illuminate Plutarch’s relationship to Plato and Platonism, often in the context of his influence on education, while other essays look at Plutarch in his everyday life, investigating his thoughts on gender, sexuality, wealth, and animals. Five essays focus on reception.

Plutarch is often seen nowadays as a champion of the animal cause, and virtually as a precursor of the modern pro-animal argument. It is important, however, to recognize that the prominence of animals in Plutarch’s work is symptomatic of the widespread and vibrant textual experimentation with animals in imperial Greco-Roman literature. The trend peaks in the second century AD, but animals were relevant within imperial philosophical thought too. Like many authors (and their ancient readers), Plutarch draws upon and responds to (a) the rich and abiding literary tradition of mobilizing animal imagery and themes and (b) the long-established philosophical debate on animal psychology and rationality, with far-reaching ethical implications about how animals should be treated. The chapter surveys the attitudes toward animals across the Plutarchan corpus and offers in-depth contextualization of the dialogues De sollertia animalium and the notoriously ironic Gryllus.