Sublime

Literary/ Cultural Context Essay

Monika Fludernik (Universität Freiburg)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.5.2.03: French Writing and Culture of the Seventeenth Century: Classical and Baroque, 1600-1700.
Vol. editors: Heather Kirk (University of Western Ontario), Kathrina LaPorta (New York University), Polly Mangerson (DePaul University), Julia Prest (University of St Andrews), Allison Stedman (University of North Carolina, Charlotte), Tim Unwin (University of Bristol), David Williams (University of Sheffield)

Domains

Aesthetics
Concept/ Method/ Technique (in art)
Literary Concept

Dates

Date of occurrence 1650

Places

France (Location)
Germany (Location)
United Kingdom (Location)
United States (Involved)

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The sublime is one of the key concepts in eighteenth-century and Romantic aesthetics. The term derives from the anonymous treatise

Peri hypsous

, long thought to have been composed by Longinus, in which rhetorical effects of the sublime are described in detail. The English and French lexeme

sublime

also has its roots in the rhetorical tradition, in the distinction of

stilus sublimus

versus

stilus humilis.

In neoclassical poetics this influential distinction between a ‘high style’ for tragedy and a ‘low style’ for comedy may have fed into the choice of vocabulary for the seventeenth-century translations of Pseudo-Longinus into French (trans. Boileau, 1674) and English (trans. John Hall, 1652). Following poetological rediscovery, the term soon gained practical application in the…

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1809 words

Citation: Fludernik, Monika. "Sublime". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 05 November 2001; last revised 04 September 2023. [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=1070, accessed 31 October 2024.]

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Sublime

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