The Landscapes of the Sublime 1700-1830: Classic Ground [Hardcover]

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.Acknowledgements Introduction 1. 'We had hopes that pointed to the clouds': the Alps and the Poetics of Ascent 2. 'A volcano heard afar': Vesuvius, Etna, and the Poetics of Depth 3. 'The region of beauty and delight': Re-imagining the Polar Sublime 4. 'The lone and level sands': Romanticism and the Desert 5. 'My purpose was humbler, but also higher': Thomas De Quincey at the Final Frontier Bibliography Index

Duffy's aim is not to 'offer any kind of corrective reading of any given position within this genre of philosophical aesthetics' (12), but rather to widen and to challenge its interpretative horizons and limitations by generating 'new cultural histories of various species of the 'natural sublime' during the eighteenth century and Romantic period' (13). With this in mind, Duffy definitely delivers. What follows his introduction is a stunningly artful tour of eighteenth-century poetry, prose, history and philosophy: one which traverses the heights of the alpine mountainside, scrambles back down to the dark craters of Italian volcanoes, thrusts us out toward the seemingly blank spaces of the Arctic and Antarctic then pulls us toward those of the deserts of central and southern Africa before, finally, making us stand still to consider what is above and beyond these earthly sites of enquiry: outer space, astronomy, as a final, different mode of engaging with the sublime. Katherine Fender, The BARS Review

Cian Duffy is Fellow of the Cambridge European Society and Reader in English Literature at St Mary's University College, UK. His research interests are in British eighteenth-century and Romantic-periodlsÇ