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
sublimealso has its roots in the rhetorical tradition, in the distinction of
stilus sublimusversus
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…
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.]