6/22/2023 0 Comments Sublime in gothic literature![]() It is a visceral response to the basic need for self-preservation and is characterized by such feelings as awe, surprise, and relief tinged with horror. He considers the origins of the sublime in the feeling of delight, which he maintains is based on the removal of pain or danger. In the first part of the essay, Burke explores and defines the sublime. This approach is unique in relation to other aesthetic theories because it allows for psychological and physiological justifications for the aesthetic experience. The discussion covers three aspects: individual passions, the essences that inspire emotion in an individual, and the rules of nature that govern the first two aspects. He sets out to distinguish the two terms and define them in light of the basis of their psychological origins. In his A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Edmund Burke challenges the ways in which other philosophers and aestheticians use the terms "sublime" and "beautiful," contending that the words are often employed inaccurately and exclusively. The racist implications of this belief in the biological determination of character are apparent, and have been examined by several scholars. The representation of villains and monsters in Gothic literature demonstrates this adherence to physiognomy, as these characters possess physical traits associated with evil-dark eyes, heavy eyebrows, and dark complexions. As scholars have illustrated, people in nineteenth-century Europe and America believed strongly in physiognomy, the theory that physical appearance and "blood" determined and reflected a person's character. ![]() ![]() Works written in this tradition are inherently linked to the social context in which they were created, and a great deal of critical commentary focuses on the representation of societal and cultural fear in the face of the dissolution of tradition, gender roles, oppression, and race in Gothic literature. The Gothic tradition originated in response to a period of rapid and far-reaching societal, cultural, and theological change in eighteenth-century Europe. 90–203.Society, Culture, and the Gothic INTRODUCTION Immanuel Kant, ‘The Analytic of the Sublime’ in The Critique of Judgement, Part 1 (1790) trans. 24.Įdmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1759) ed. Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986) p. Howard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975).Ĭassius Longinus, Longinus on Sublimity (c.1st-2nd century AD) trans. Her arguments concerning the relationship between I/not-I are drawn from Tzvetan Todorov’s, The Fantastic: a Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. ![]() See Jackson, Fantasy: the Literature of Subversion pp. Dickson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985) pp. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’ (1919) in Art and Literature: Jensen’s Gradiva, Leonardo Da Vinci and Other Works, trans. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This idea of instability can also be extended to accounts of the Romantic sublime an analysis of which enables us to bring together a Gothic discourse and certain Romantic philosophies. 306)Īlthough I take issue with Morris’s claims that the Gothic sublime is little more than a repressed version of the uncanny, I do acknowledge that his identification of an inherent instability within the Gothic sublime is a useful starting-point for our analysis. Gothic sublimity - by releasing into fiction images and desires long suppressed, deeply hidden, forced into silence - greatly intensifies the dangers of an uncontrollable release from restraint, (p. The eighteenth-century sublime always implied (but managed to restrain) the threat of lost control. It is a vertiginous and plunging - not a soaring - sublime, which takes us deep within rather than far beyond the human sphere. In exploring the entanglements of love and terror, the Gothic novel pursues a version of the sublime utterly without transcendence.
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