Reinventing the Sublime: Post-Romantic Literature and Theory - Softcover

Steven Vine

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1845196759 ISBN 13: 9781845196752

Publisher: Liverpool University Press, 2014

Synopsis

Looks at the return of the sublime in post-modernity, and at intimations of a post-Romanticsublime in Romanticism itself. The sublime is explored as a discourse of invention taking the Latin meaning of to come upon, find, discover that involves an encounter with the new, the unregulated and the surprising. Lyotard and Zizek, among others, have reconfigured the sublime for post-modernity by exceeding the subject-centred discourse of Romantic aesthetics, and promoting not a sublime of the subject, but of the unpresentable, the Real, the unknown, the other. Reinventing the Sublime looks at 18th-century, Romantic, modernist and post-modern inventions of the sublime alongside contemporary critical accounts of the relationship of sublimity to subjectivity, aesthetics, politics and history, including 9/11. It reads Burke and Kant alongside post-modern discourses on the sublime, and Wordsworth, De Quincey and Mary Shelley in relation to temporality and materiality in Romanticism, and considers modernist inflections of the sublime in T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes in relation to the themes of disjunction and excess in modernity. The author examines the postmodern revisiting of the sublime in Thomas Pynchon, D.M Thomas and Toni Morrison, and draws on Lyotard's reading of the sublime as an aesthetic of the avant-garde and as a singular and disruptive event, to argue that the sublime in its post-modern and contemporary forms encodes an anxious but affirmative relationship to the ironies of temporality and history. Reinventing the Sublime focuses on the endurance of the sublime in contemporary thinking, and on the way that the sublime can be read as a figure of the relationship of representation to temporality itself.

About this title

About the Author

Steven Vine is Senior Lecturer in English at Swansea University, and among many articles is the author of Blakes Poetry: Spectral Visions (1993), Emily Bronte (1998) and William Blake (2007). He is the editor of the Penguin edition of D.H. Lawrences Aarons Rod (1995), and of Literature in Psychoanalysis: a Reader (2005).

Edition details

• Publisher: Liverpool University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1845196759
• ISBN 13: 9781845196752
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 272