Reinventing the Sublime

This study looks at the return of the sublime in postmodernity literature as well as the intimations of a 'post-Romantic' sublime in Romanticism itself. It examines 18th-century, Romantic, modernist, and postmodern 'inventions' of the sublime alongside contemporary critical accounts of the relationship of sublimity to subjectivity, aesthetics, politics, and history. It reads Burke and Kant alongside postmodern discourses on the sublime; 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 book 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.