MFS Modern Fiction Studies

Doyle, Laura (Laura Anne)
Sublime Barbarians in the Narrative of Empire: Or, Longinus at Sea in The Waves
MFS Modern Fiction Studies - Volume 42, Number 2, Summer 1996, pp. 323-347

The Johns Hopkins University Press

Laura Doyle - Sublime Barbarians in the Narrative of Empire: Or, Longinus at Sea in The Waves - Modern Fiction Studies 42:2 Modern Fiction Studies 42.2 (1996) 323-347 Sublime Barbarians in the Narrative of Empire; or, Longinus at Sea in the Waves Laura Doyle At first glance an idea that transcends history, the sublime has recently been interpreted historically and revived theoretically. Critics have begun to tease out the political values woven into the sublime as well as to reconfigure it for a postmodern or feminist aesthetic. Working in dialogue with these projects, I will trace here a racial and imperial substructure of the sublime discoverable at its inception, in Longinus's treatise Peri Hypsous (On the Sublime). In the Romantic period the idea of the sublime, while still racially inflected, undergoes a transformation as it becomes a key animating principle for newly racialized narratives of culture: it shapes a story whereby the embrace and subsumption of an ancient racial past propels England toward an imperial future. It is as the British empire faces the very limits such narratives of sublimity had promised to transcend that Virginia Woolf writes The Waves. In this novel Woolf labors to turn the narrative of the sublime inside-out without negating her own narrative's investment in sublimity. The Waves thus offers fresh insight not only into the difficulties entailed in any recuperation of the sublime but also into how aesthetics form the...