Chapter Three pursues the discussion of aesthetics broached in the previous chapter, focussing on the aesthetic experience most often associated with Romanticism: the Sublime. Contrasting the influential histories of Samuel Holt Monk and Marjorie Nicholson, it argues that no single theory of the sublime dominated the eighteenth century, and that Kant’s influential ‘Analytic of the Sublime’ does not exhaust the term’s many historical meanings, which included the rhetorical sublime, the natural sublime, and the philosophical sublime. The chapter addresses the sublime in a variety of discourses and practices, including landscape gardening, astronomy, gothic fiction, revolutionary politics, language theory and antiquarian texts such as Ossian and the Scandinavian Veddas. It then distinguishes between Burke’s physiological, Kant’s cognitive, Schiller’s moral, and Herder’s more ‘naturalised’ versions of the philosophical sublime, before looking at the rhetorical sublime in Longinus and eighteenth-century language theories, and finally at the natural sublime in landscape aesthetics and in the poetry of Wordsworth, Leopardi, and Mickiewicz. It concludes that academic reconstructions of the Romantic sublime based on Kant have skewed the history of the concept, in particular by legitimating models of Romantic individuality that have excluded women.

In 1772 Joseph Banks recorded observations on the Hebridean island of Staffa. His most striking ‘discovery’ was a sea cave resembling a cathedral. Banks claimed the cave was known by the name of the mythical Irish warrior Fionn mac Cumhaill, or Fingal, to use the variant made famous by Macpherson’s Ossian poems. The publication of Banks’s findings prompted a small industry of travel writing that combined lithic observations with minstrelsy and national history. In 1797 the French geologist Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond published his research on the topic, which suggested that the association with Ossian was the result of a misunderstanding: whereas the Gaelic for Fingal’s Cave would be ‘an-ua-fine’, the actual name was ‘an-ua-vine’, which translated as ‘melodious cave’. Far from settling the matter, Saint-Fond’s intervention only added to the mystique. In this chapter I argue that the cave’s fashionable status can be partly attributed to a series of re-soundings, by which printed texts and theatrical performances relayed aspects of on-site accounts to new readers and audiences. Where existing models of Romantic resonance have emphasized a correspondence between sound and thought, the fame of Fingal’s Cave emerges here as the result of almost mindless repetition.

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.