Abstract

Longinus on the sublime describes the extraordinary event of cognitive transformation peculiar to literary discourse; his idea resembles but is not the same as the metaphysical threshold, described by Wordsworth and Kant, where imagination ends but the mind continues in transcendent self-reflection. I consider those ideas in relation to seminal English criticism at the turn of the 18th century, which, I argue, adapted Longinus' model of literary conversion to the salvific narrative of Christian teleology and elaborated from it an epic persona of redeemed consciousness, whose natural and historical occasions for sublimity would yet be grounded in the literary, so far as nature and history were folded into the argument of revealed religion. For, even while conforming, in its natural descriptions of magnitude and force, to idioms of empirical psychology and natural science, the modern aesthetic of the sublime naturalized the Biblio-centric perspective. Indeed, the co-development of the sublime aesthetic and the modern self-image of redemption was first concentrated in theories of epic reform, which debated the formal, artistic compatibility of natural and revealed religions. Yet, as a universal criterion for literary value, the sublime transcended that schism to facilitate the progress of poetry from the heathen past to the regenerate present. Even so, and further, the fixed historical and psychological bifurcation of the fallen and the redeemed was reiterated in the breach which divided the Church, north and south, reformed and papist, a fault-line figured in the Alps, whence the sublime would be developed through Alpine imagery to describe the interior site of spiritual rupture and change: Chapter One is an extensive overview, theoretical, historical, literary; Chapter Two employs an ekphrastic model of sublimity, relevant to the controversy of epic machines and the marvelous; Chapter Two, in treating the modern unity of landscape and text, proves the aptness of Longinian rhetoric in contrast to Socratic dialogue: Chapter Four examines the arguments of reformation consciousness in "Ode to Fear," Clarissa, and Tom Jones, in terms of the flaw from which sublime self-abstraction issues; Chapter Five analyses the Victorian epic, Aurora Leigh, as a final attempt to write the poem of redemption which also redeems poetry---now from insipid modernity