The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present edited by Timothy M. Costelloe (review)

The volume is very attractive in appearance. Larger in size than an ordinary scholarly book, printed on magazine-style glossy paper, it features a wealth of illustrations: reproductions of paintings, photos of architectural monuments, and maps of natural sites. The cover reproduces a classic example of the sublime in art (picturing an instance of the sublime in nature), namely, J.M.W. Turner’s Snow Storm: Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps, from 1812. The disproportion between the original size of this painting and its reproduction on the beautiful cover of the book poses the general problem of representation in art, a traditional problem “subjectivized” in Kant’s theory of the “faculties,” and especially in his aesthetics of the sublime. Theodore Gracyk discusses this problem in one of the essays of the collection, “The Sublime and the Fine Arts.” Gracyk takes as his point of departure a disproportion between the original of Mark Rothko’s Black on Maroon and its reproduction on a postcard, but “greatness of dimension” as “a powerful cause of the sublime” (Burke) is considered in Turner’s case as well. Can art be reproduced? Can a sublime event be represented? Does not the word “sublime” refer to this very un(re)presentability? Other essays in the collection ask these questions as well.

Most of the fifteen essays collected here combine basic introductory, encyclopedic information (usefully accompanied by the editor’s own introduction) with a scholarly, philosophical problematization of the phenomenon and the aesthetics of the sublime. The origin of the book was a scholarly event: the NEH Summer Seminar in Scotland in 2007 entitled Aesthetics of the Scottish Enlightenment and Beyond. But this origin of the volume has only slightly influenced its content. In spite of this focus on Scotland, it offers a balanced introduction to contemporary discussions related to the notion of the sublime, and would be an excellent text for a survey course, or even a graduate seminar, if David B. Johnson’s essay “The Postmodern Sublime: Presentation and Its Limits” were supplemented by Jeffrey S. Librett’s edition and translation of the collection Of the Sublime: Presence in Question from 1993 (Du Sublime, 1988), a collection representative of the “continental” thought on the sublime.

The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present consists of two parts: “Philosophical History of the Sublime” and “Disciplinary and Other Perspectives.” The first (philosophical, theoretical) part contains three essays on the authors that no work on the sublime could ignore: Malcolm Heath’s essay on Longinus, Rodolphe Gasché’s on Edmund Burke, and Melissa McBay Merritt’s on Kant. They not only provide an excellent introduction to these three authors’ work: they offer new interpretations of their thought and of the historical reception of their texts. Heath considers a possibility of relating the treatise Peri hupsous to the “true” (and not only pseudos) Longinus, Gasché questions the traditional reading of Burke in terms of the commonplace opposition between the beautiful and the sublime, and McBay Merritt sheds some new light on the relationship between the moral feeling and the feeling of the sublime in Kant.

In addition to Burke, the two chapters on the British authors (by the editor of the volume and by Rachel Zuckert) discuss the Earl of Shaftesbury, Thomas Reid, Joseph Addison, Joshua Reynolds, Alexander Gerard, Lord Kames, Archibald Alison, and Dugald Stewart. The origins of the collection (together with some further discussions of those authors in the second part of the book) are particularly evident in these chapters. To be sure, the thorough discussion of the British authors reveals some unexpected connections, such as for example a possible—albeit unacknowledged—influence of Alexander Gerard on Kant’s theory of the subjective nature of the phenomenon of the sublime. Eva Madelaine Martin’s essay on the sublime in early modern France contributes to the debunking of the persistent belief that the modern history of the sublime began with Boileau’s translation...