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.
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).