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Applying Butler‘s gender performance theory and critiquing authoritative philosophical discourse on the sublime, the essay examines the Gothic sublime as phantasmatic masculine drag. Focusing on Walpole‘s flamboyant flouting of Longinus‘s rhetorical prescriptions, the essay also explores how The Castle ofOtrantos fictional progeny continue to drag sublimity into Gothic drag king performances.
The challenge of the sublime argues that the unprecedented visual inventiveness of the Romantic period in Britain could be seen as a response to theories of the sublime, more specifically to Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). While it is widely accepted that the Enquiry contributed to shaping the thematics of terror that became fashionable in British art from the 1770s, this book contends that its influence was of even greater consequence, paradoxically because of Burke’s conviction that the visual arts were incapable of conveying the sublime. His argument that the sublime was beyond the reach of painting, because of the mimetic nature of visual representation, directly or indirectly incited visual artists to explore not just new themes, but also new compositional strategies and even new or undeveloped pictorial and graphic media, such as the panorama, book illustrations and capricci. More significantly, it began to call into question mimetic representational models, causing artists to reflect about the presentation of the unpresentable and the inadequacy of their endeavours, and thus drawing attention to the process of artistic production itself, rather than the finished artwork. By revisiting the links between eighteenth-century aesthetic theory and visual practices, The challenge of the sublime establishes new interdisciplinary connections which address researchers in the fields of art history, cultural studies and aesthetics.
203 7 u ‘Sublime dreams’: ruin paintings and architectural fantasies From the beginning of the eighteenth century, ruins, vestiges of the past and architectural fragments became an essential feature of the British cultural imaginary and a recurrent topos in the arts. For more than a century, the fascination they exerted was fuelled by archaeological discoveries, direct encounters with classical sites by British visitors on the Grand Tour and then social and political upheavals which forcefully drew attention to the transience of all things. Such an interest
109 4 u The sublime contained: academic compromises In 1776, the Irish painter James Barry painted an intriguing double portrait, in which he represented himself and his friend and compatriot Edmund Burke enacting a famous epic scene from Homer’s Odyssey: Portraits of Barry and Burke in the Characters of Ulysses and a Companion Fleeing from the Cave of Polyphemus (Figure 1 and Plate 1). Burke plays the part of Ulysses and is characterised as a figure of wisdom and leadership, with one hand pointing upwards in a gesture of warning. Next to him, Barry, leaning
3 The Gothic sublime Claire Colebrook Gothic architecture is indeed inseparable from a will to build churches longer and taller than the Romanesque churches. Ever farther, ever higher … But this difference is not simply quantitative; it marks a qualitative change: the static relation, form-matter, tends to fade into the background in
confront the idea of England as a sentimental fantasy, an artificial construct that evades empirical fact, yet he also avoids a simple postmodern parody of Englishness by indicating the value and merit of national culture and its narrative role in grounding personal and collective experience. The English sublime Set in a mythologised, late fifth- or early sixth-century post-Arthurian Britain, in which the east of England is threatened by Saxon occupation, The Buried Giant follows an elderly couple named Axl and Beatrice whose
In Ann Radcliffes The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian, the sublime in nature represents a benevolent patriarchy which works in tandem with ‘the heightened awareness’ that characterizes sensibility in order to educate and empower Emily St Aubert and Ellena di Rosalba. Both of these forces work symbiotically within the gazes (read ‘spectatorship’) of the heroines. Conversely, these forces are threatening to the heroes, in that they limit Valancourts and Vivaldis ability to gain their desires and to influence the events surrounding their beloveds. This gender-based disparity reflects eighteenth century familial politics and suggests that, despite Radcliffes apparent protofeminism in giving her heroines agency over the patriarchal weapons of the sublime and sensibility, her reinventing these forces to empower her heroines at the expense of the heroes actually buys into and supports patriarchal ideals of the roles of difference and sameness in heterosexual desire.
85 3 u Reynolds, the great style and the Burkean sublime Given Burke’s doubts about the possibility of a pictorial sublime, his ideas spread with surprising success among the visual artists of his time. From the 1770s, his aesthetics of terror pervaded pictorial practices ranging from popular entertainment to academic exhibi tion paintings. While the growing taste for thrills easily accounts for the development of dramatic visual spectacles in the last two decades of the century, Burke’s influence on academic practices is more intriguing. Seeing that the
This article considers a unified polar Gothic as a way of examining texts set in Arctic and Antarctic space. Through analysis of Coleridge‘s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Shelleys Frankenstein, and Poe‘s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket , the author creates a framework for understanding polar Gothic, which includes liminal space, the supernatural, the Gothic sublime, ghosts and apparitions, and imperial Gothic anxieties about the degradation of civilisation. Analysing Verne‘s scientific-adventure novel The Adventures of Captain Hatteras (1866) with this framework, the author contextualises the continued public interest in the lost Franklin expedition and reflects on nineteenth-century polar Gothic anxieties in the present day. Polar space creates an uncanny potential for seeing ones own self and examining what lies beneath the surface of ones own rational mind.
29 1 u The Philosophical Enquiry, theories of the sublime and the sister arts tradition In his authoritative bicentenary edition of Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, James T. Boulton wrote these introductory words: Without exaggerating the wisdom of the Enquiry, one must rank it among the most important documents of its century. Besides painters, architects and a host of minor writers, such major figures as Johnson, Blake (despite his overt scorn for Burke’s ideas), Wordsworth, Hardy, Diderot, Lessing, and