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 examines the ‘Critical sublime’ as developed by Kant in the ‘Analytic of the Sublime’ in his Kritik der Urteilskraft. It interprets Kant as adumbrating three features that later become central tropes of the Romantic characterization of sublimity: the sense that its source and ultimate value lie beyond everyday experience; that it involves the subject, rather than any external object, as the immediate and direct object of consciousness; and that the paradigmatically natural phenomena and their qualities that ostensibly excite the experience are less important than the contemplative relationship one takes to them. Consideration of each in turn gives the chapter its narrative structure and divides it into three main sections, ‘Transcendence and the Phenomenal Self’, ‘The Moral Subject Within’, and ‘The “Objects” of Nature and Art’. The discussion concludes with a brief observation on the proto-Romantic sentiment that Kant expresses in his view of poetry and the arts.

This chapter analyzes the redistribution of the Romantic sublime in Victorian culture. Contrary to the assumption that the Victorians seem to have neglected the sublime, it shows how the concept was unpacked into a busy metonymy, first by Thomas Carlyle when he speaks of inverse sublimity. A fit for the world disassembled by the Industrial Revolution and for Charles Lyell’s geology of ongoing planetary transformation, Carlyle’s metonymy heralds the Victorian chthonic sublime, a structure of feeling where affect, once bound in awe, terror and rupture, is reclaimed for melancholia and tasked with the work of mourning. It is a work that finds an emphatic articulation in John Ruskin’s aesthetics and art history, notably in his theory of pathetic fallacy, and in Matthew Arnold’s poetry and criticism, especially in the concept of touchstone, with important critical footholds in the Victorian industrial novel, evolutionary theory and Pre-Raphaelite painting and poetry.

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 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.