American Journal of Philology

“The sublime” has fascinated the Western world since Boileau’s translation of Longinus’ De Sublimitate in 1674. It was Boileau who gave the grammatical eccentricity of “the” sublime its vernacular existence. “Le sublime” was his French equivalent of Longinian hupsos; “the sublime” became the outcome in English (“a Gallicism,” declared Samuel Johnson in 1755, “but now naturalized”), “das Erhabene” (in a language where the idiom is less remarkable) the German equivalent.

From Johnson’s age onwards, the task of elucidating the sublime has exercised some notable minds: Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant; American abstract expressionist painter Barnett Newman and French postmodernist Jean-François Lyotard. From hints in De Sublimitate, Burke and Kant reorient the category away from literature, also from beauty, towards human responses to terrors or wonders beyond the human sphere. And from hints in Burke and Kant, Newman and Lyotard relate the sublime to the artistic (or other) striving to reach beyond the world of representation or convention. A textbook case, then, not of classical reception, but of the classical tradition, in all its complex continuities and discontinuities.

In recent years, academic scrutiny of the sublime has turned into a growth industry. Wide-ranging treatments include: K. Axelsson, The Sublime: Precursors and British Eighteenth-Century Conceptions (Bern 2007); B. Saint-Girons, Le sublime, de l’antiquité à nos jours (Paris 2005); P. Marot, La littérature et le sublime (Toulouse 2007); D. Till, Das doppelte Erhabene: eine Argumentationsfigur von der Antike bis zur Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts (Berlin 2006).

Costelloe’s collection is the latest wide-ranging treatment. A list of contents and contributors is indicative. After Costelloe’s “Short Introduction to a Long History,” the book is divided into two parts: “Philosophical History of the Sublime” and “Disciplinary and Other Perspectives.” Part 1 has eight chapters: “Longinus and the Ancient Sublime” by the only classical scholar in Costelloe’s [End Page 517] team, Malcolm Heath; “Revisiting Edmund Burke’s ‘Double Aesthetics’” by the comparativist Rodolphe Gasché; three chapters by philosophers, “The Moral Source of the Kantian Sublime” by Melissa McBay Merritt, “The Sublime in Shaftesbury, Reid, Addison, and Reynolds” by Costelloe, “The Associative Sublime: Gerard, Kames, Alison, and Stewart” by Rachel Zuckert; “The Prehistory of the Sublime in Early Modern France” by the French literature/aesthetics scholar, Éva Madeleine Martin; and finally, from two philosophers of rather differing orientations, “The German Sublime After Kant” by Paul Guyer and “The Postmodern Sublime” by David B. Johnson. Part 2 has seven chapters: “The ‘Subtler’ Sublime in Modern Dutch Aesthetics” by John R. J. Eyck (Germanic Studies); “The First American Sublime” by historian Chandos Michael Brown; “The Environmental Sublime” by geographer-aesthetician Emily Brady; “Religion and the Sublime” by the philosophical pair Andrew Chignell and Matthew C. Halteman; “The British Romantic Sublime” by Adam Potkay (English/Humanities); “The Sublime and the Fine Arts” by Theodore Gracyk (Philosophy); and “Architecture and the Sublime” by architectural historian Richard A. Etlin.

The organization of the book is largely self-explanatory, but for no apparent reason two chapters in part 1 are out of historical sequence: Merritt’s chapter on Kant comes early, and Martin’s, on the early French sublime, late. Throughout, there is a bias towards philosophy, but literature, visual art, and ideas in general receive reasonable coverage; music is effectively ignored. In chronological terms, the eighteenth century, up to and including Kant, gets the lion’s share; later centuries are represented more patchily; Martin, most notably, covers the seventeenth and touches on earlier centuries; antiquity is largely confined to Heath’s account of Longinus, although it also makes an unexpectedly prominent appearance in Etlin’s discussion of architecture.

Although the publisher acclaims a “unique and comprehensive overview,” the collection is hardly unique (cf. my list of recent treatments above). Nor, as indicated, is it comprehensive, and Costelloe’s introduction reasonably disclaims even the possibility of such coverage (7). However, the absence of music is surprising: Wagner, for one...