This study begins with a look at works by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, focusing on the 18th-century view of childhood and fantasy. It expands on the notion that English Romanticism played a significant role in preparing adults to accept fantasy literature for children.

This study begins with a look at works by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, focusing on the 18th-century view of childhood and fantasy. It expands on the notion that English Romanticism played a significant role in preparing adults to accept fantasy literature for children.

From the dawn of European civilization to the twentieth century, the automaton—better known today as the robot—has captured the Western imagination and provided a vital lens into the nature of humanity. Historian Minsoo Kang argues that to properly understand the human-as-machine and the human-as-fundamentally-different-from-machine, we must trace the origins of these ideas and examine how they were transformed by intellectual, cultural, and artistic appearances of the automaton throughout the history of the West. Kang tracks the first appearance of the automaton in ancient myths through the medieval and Renaissance periods, marks the proliferation of the automaton as a central intellectual concept in the Scientific Revolution and the subsequent backlash during the Enlightenment, and details appearances in Romantic literature and the introduction of the living machine in the Industrial Age. He concludes with a reflection on the destructive confrontation between humanity and machinery in the modern era and the reverberations of the humanity-machinery theme today. Sublime Dreams of Living Machines is an ambitious historical exploration and, at heart, an attempt to fully elucidate the rich and varied ways we have utilized our most uncanny creations to explore essential questions about ourselves.

Challenging literary histories that locate the emergence of fantastic literature in the Romantic period, David Sandner shows that tales of wonder and imagination were extremely popular throughout the eighteenth century. Sandner engages contemporary critical definitions and defenses of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century fantastic literature, demonstrating that a century of debate and experimentation preceded the Romantic's interest in the creative imagination. In 'The Fairy Way of Writing,' Joseph Addison first defines the literary use of the supernatural in a 'modern' and 'rational' age. Other writers like Richard Hurd, James Beattie, Samuel Johnson, James Percy, and Walter Scott influence the shape of the fantastic by defining and describing the modern fantastic in relation to a fabulous and primitive past. As the genre of the 'purely imaginary,' Sandner argues, the fantastic functions as a discourse of the sublime imagination, albeit a contested discourse that threatens to disrupt any attempt to ground the sublime in the realistic or sympathetic imagination. His readings of works by authors such as Ann Radcliffe, William Beckford, Horace Walpole, Mary Shelley, Walter Scott, and James Hogg not only redefine the antecedents of the fantastic but also offer a convincing account of how and why the fantastic came to be marginalized in the wake of the Enlightenment.

"Gripping and breathless, Into the Sublime is equal parts terrifying, claustrophobic, psychological, and cunning." —Wendy Heard, author of She's Too Pretty to Burn and Dead End Girls A new YA psychological thriller from Kate A. Boorman, author of What We Buried, about four teenage girls who descend into a dangerous underground cave system in search of a lake of local legend, said to reveal your deepest fears. When the cops arrive, only a few things are clear: - Four girls entered a dangerous cave. - Three of them came out alive. - Two of them were rushed to the hospital. - And one is soaked in blood and ready to talk. Amelie Desmarais' story begins believably enough: Four girls from a now-defunct thrill-seeking group planned an epic adventure to find a lake that Colorado locals call "The Sublime." Legend has it that the lake has the power to change things for those who risk—and survive—its cavernous depths. They each had their reasons for going. For Amelie, it was a promise kept to her beloved cousin, who recently suffered a tragic accident during one of the group’s dares. But as her account unwinds, and the girls’ personalities and motives are drawn, things get complicated. Amelie is hardly the thrill-seeking type, and it appears she’s not the only one with the ability to deceive. Worse yet, Amelie is covered in someone's blood, but whose exactly? And where's the fourth girl? Is Amelie spinning a tale to cover her guilt? Or was something inexplicable waiting for the girls down there? Amelie's the only one with answers, and she's insisting on an explanation that is more horror-fantasy than reality. Maybe the truth lies somewhere in between? After all, strange things inhabit dark places. And sometimes we bring the dark with us.

Notions of the sublime are most often associated with the extraordinary, and include the intra-psychic, high-cultural and exceptional occurrences of elation and exaltation as part of the experience. Using psychoanalytic and aesthetic theories, this book aims to revitalise the sublime by re-evaluating its significance for contemporary life and, in a unique and fascinating endeavour, opens up a space that explores the sublime in the ordinary, everyday and quotidian. Through the exploration of familiar (i.e. love, death, art and nature) and unfamiliar (pornography, education and politics) threads of the sublime experience, this book posits the sublime as invoking an ordinary human response which contains minute, inter-psychic, inclusive and even mass-media cultural elements, and carries within it therapeutic and political potential. It explores loving and caring, as well as hateful, traumatic and destructive encounters with the sublime, demonstrating how it can overflow and destabilise our psychological and social symbolic structures and expose their fictional and constructed nature, but also shows it as something we can engage with in order to re-create and heal ourselves, above and beyond what any 'given' form of reality can offer us. Demonstrating the urgent need to understand the sublime as something that is immanent in our everyday life, a source of energy and inspiration that can be invoked to support our mental health and well-being, this book will be of great interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and art therapists, as well as scholars and students of philosophy and popular culture.

Often labelled as ‘indescribable’, the sublime is a term that has been debated for centuries amongst writers, artists, philosophers and theorists. Usually related to ideas of the great, the awe-inspiring and the overpowering, the sublime has become a complex yet crucial concept in many disciplines. Offering historical overviews and explanations, Philip Shaw looks at: the legacy of the earliest, classical theories of the sublime through the romantic to the postmodern and avant-garde sublimity the major theorists of the sublime such as Kant, Burke, Lyotard, Derrida, Lacan and Zizek, offering critical introductions to each the significance of the concept through a range of literary readings including the Old and New testaments, Homer, Milton and writing from the romantic era how the concept of the sublime has affected other art forms such as painting and film, from abstract expressionism to David Lynch’s neo-noir. This remarkably clear study of what is, in essence, a term which evades definition, is essential reading for students of literature, critical and cultural theory.