This critical anthology examines the place of the sublime in the cultural history of the late eighteenth century and Romantic period. Traditionally, the sublime has been associated with impressive natural phenomena and has been identified as a narrow aesthetic or philosophical category. Cultures of the Sublime: Selected Readings, 1750-1830: - Recovers a broader context for engagements with, and writing about, the sublime - Offers a selection of texts from a wide range of ostensibly unrelated areas of knowledge which both generate and investigate sublime effects - Considers writings about mountains, money, crowds, the Gothic, the exotic and the human mind - Contextualises and supports the extracts with detailed editorial commentary Also featuring helpful suggestions for further reading, this is an ideal resource for anyone seeking a fresh, up-to-date assessment of the sublime.

The first English language collection on the musical sublime. Reveals music's place at the forefront of this interdisciplinary aesthetic category.

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- List of Figures -- Editor's Introduction -- 1 The Event That Cannot (Not) Happen -- 2 Sublimity and the Dialectic of Horror and Spirituality -- 3 The Popular Sublime and the Notional Sublime -- 4 Of Fake and Real Sublimes -- 5 "Black and Glittering": The Inscrutable Sublime -- 6 Uncertainty Prone to Vulgarity -- 7 Recentering the Sublime: Cognitive and Neuropsychological Approaches -- 8 Flow, Freedom, and the Gamified Sublime -- 9 The Ambiguity Effects of the Techno-Sublime -- 10 From Diagrams to Deities: Evoking the Cosmological Sublime -- 11 Feeling Not at Home in the Twenty-First-Century World: The Sublimein Contemporary Environmental Aesthetics -- 12 The Sublime as a Mode of Address in Contemporary EnvironmentalPhotography -- 13 Magnificent Disasters: Sublime Landscapes in Post-Millennial Cinema -- 14 Psychedelia and the History of the Chemical Sublime -- 15 The Birds and the Bees -- List of Contributors -- Index

More than 130 years from Matthew Arnold.s pronouncement that human beings .must be compelled to relish the sublime., education in the humanities still relies on the ideal of culture as the means of intellectual development. In this distinctive and original work, Martin Ryle and Kate Soper explore the growing tensions and contradictions between this and the contemporary world of work, pleasure, and consumption. While critical of the hypocrisies and elitism that can attach to notions of cultural self-realisation, the authors nonetheless defend its overall educational and social value. Their wide-ranging discussion takes in critiques of philosophers from Kant and Schiller to Nietzsche and Marx, and includes historically contextualized readings of novels by Wollstonecraft, Hardy, Gissing, London, and Woolf.In their sustained defence of a conception of personal worth and self-fulfillment for its own sake, Ryle and Soper not only offer a powerful critique of the continuing dominance of work in contemporary society, but also provide a compelling alternative to the standard postmodern scepticism about the relevance of high culture.

The Landscapes of the Sublime examines the place of the 'natural sublime' in the cultural history of the eighteenth century and Romantic period. Drawing on a range of scholarship and historical sources, it offers a fresh perspective on the different species of the 'natural sublime' encountered by British and European travellers and explorers.

In its range and sophistication, Sublime Desire is a valuable addition to postmodernist studies as well as to studies of the historical romance novel.

Throughout, the author seeks to delineate the ways the political masquerades as aesthetic discourse and aesthetic experience. Covering a wide range of material from fiction, poetry, aesthetics, and political discourse to memoirs, film, and historical documents, the book reconsiders a number of prominent cultural figures, including Wang Guowei, Cai Yuanpei, Lu Xun, Eileen Chang, Mao Zedong, Zhu Guangqian, and Li Zehou. It also analyzes such important cultural features and events as Western influences on the formation of modern Chinese aesthetic discourse, modernist writings, Revolutionary Cinema, the Cultural Revolution, and New Wave Fiction.