Professor Boitani's latest book explores the areas of the tragic and the sublime in medieval literature by asking what medieval texts mean to modern readers. Boitani, who has written widely on medieval and comparative literature, studies tragic and sublime tensions in stories and scenes recounted by such major poets as Dante, Chaucer and Petrarch, as well as themes shared by writers and philosophers and traditional poetic images. The result is a learned, stimulating, and wide-ranging volume of studies in comparative European literature, which takes into account poems written in English, Italian and other languages, and compares them with their classical and biblical ancestors as well as with their modern descendants.

William Blake called himself a "sublime Artist" and acknowledged his own power to create "the Most Sublime Poetry." Words of Eternity reveals the fundamental importance of the term "sublime" in a defining of Blake's poetic achievement. This first full-length study of Blake and the sublime demonstrates that a sophisticated theory of sublimity permeates his writings, serving him as a personal poetics, a framework in which the difficulties and unusual strategies of the works find their rationale. Vincent De Luca combines historically grounded source study with insights from modern critical theories of textuality to identify Blake's two opposing conceptions of sublimity--a sublime of obscurity, terror, and material power and one of determinate, concentrated intellectual design. De Luca examines the interplay between these two modes from differing perspectives--theoretical, stylistic, and thematic. As the perspectives widen, they embrace many of the speculative systems of Blake's time and reveal these systems as various displaced modalities of an underlying sublime discourse. "Words of Eternity is one of the dozen or so most important books ever written about Blake's poetry. De Luca provides a wealth of new insights on every page."--Robert N. Essick, University of California, Riverside "With the context that this book supplies, we take a quantum leap in the sense we can make of Blake's project. De Luca opens our eyes to a Blake, and a sublime, that will never again be the same for us."--Nelson Hilton, University of GeorgiaOriginally published in 1991.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Description: Despite the fact that Gaspara Stampa (1523?-1554) has been recognized as one of the greatest and most creative poets and musicians of the Italian Renaissance, scholarship on her work has been surprisingly scarce and uncoordinated...read more

Product Description: This study looks at the return of the sublime in postmodernity literature as well as the intimations of a “post-Romantic” sublime in Romanticism itself. It examines 18th-century, Romantic, modernist, and postmodern “inventions” of the sublime alongside contemporary critical accounts of the relationship of sublimity to subjectivity, aesthetics, politics, and history...read more

Product Description: Is writing haunted by a categorical imperative? Does the Kantian sublime continue to shape the writer's vocation, even for twentieth-century authors? What precise shape, form, or figure does this residue of sublimity take in the fictions that follow from itand that leave it in ruins?This book explores these questions through readings of three authors who bear witness to an ambiguous exigency: writing as a demanding and exclusive task, at odds with life, but also a mere compulsion, a drive without end or reason, even a kind of torture...read more

Product Description: In close and radical readings of works by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, Flannery O'Connor and Jonathan Edwards, Linda Munk locates the American sublime in the seemingly trivial: in small and common objects, in low and humble persons, and in what the philosopher Stanley Cavell has called the "ordinariness" of American language...read more

Product Description: First published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Product Description: This volume focuses on the sublime and proposes that the ethical aspect involved in the legal sublime is to contain the arrogance of the law.It also draws attention to the "and" of interdisciplinary literary-legal studies: Law's disciplinary autonomy has been challenged...read more

Product Description: This is the first comprehensive study of the sublime in Lucan. Drawing upon renewed literary-critical interest in the tradition of philosophical aesthetics, Henry Day argues that the category of the sublime offers a means of moving beyond readings of Lucan's Bellum civile in terms of the poem's political commitment or, alternatively, nihilism...read more

Product Description: As Wallace Stevens once wrote, «a poem should be part of one’s sense of life». This book provides a record of readerly and critical explorations of the poems and life of the American poet. The author reads Stevens’s poems in the context of both the existing critical works and the commentaries provided by the poet himself (essays, letters, occasional notes and posthumous texts), and aims to prove that his artistic development was informed by two contradictory existential projects: teleological, based on Stevens’s assumption of a higher self which in its turn helps to illuminate the meaning and dynamics of the actual existence, and critical, appearing at the very moment when one questions his or her identity and assumes life to be an open and unfinished process...read more

Product Description: Ce livre analyse les rapports existants entre les notions d’abject et de sublime - que tout semble opposer et que la critique interroge à nouveau depuis quelques années, mais de manière séparée - pour penser la crise de la représentation survenue au vingtième siècle...read more

Product Description: Robinson Jeffers and the American Sublime is the most comprehensive and most substantial critical work ever devoted to the major American poet Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962). Jeffers, the best known poet of California and the American West, particularly valorized the Big Sur region, making it his own as Frost did New England and Faulkner, Mississippi, and connecting it to the wider tradition of the American sublime in Emerson, Thoreau, and John Muir...read more

Product Description: Traversing the themes of language, terror and representation, this is the first study to engage Coleridge through the sublime, showing him to have a compelling position in an ongoing conversation about finitude. Drawing on close readings of both his poetry and prose, it depicts Coleridge as a thinker of 'the limit' with contemporary force...read more

Product Description: The sublime in literature is described as the sense of awe that is evoked in the presence of great power and grandeur in nature or in art. In this engaging new volume, the role of the sublime is discussed in "Emma", "Ode to the West Wind", "Song of Myself", and many other works...read more

Product Description: Professor Boitani's latest book explores the areas of the tragic and the sublime in medieval literature by asking what medieval texts mean to modern readers. Boitani, who has written widely on medieval and comparative literature, studies tragic and sublime tensions in stories and scenes recounted by such major poets as Dante, Chaucer and Petrarch, as well as themes shared by writers and philosophers and traditional poetic images...read more

Product Description: Offering a genuinely fresh set of perspectives on Shelley's texts and contexts, Cian Duffy argues that Shelley's engagement with the British and French discourse on the sublime had a profound influence on his writing about political change in that age of revolutionary crisis...read more

Christine Battersby is a leading thinker in the field of philosophy, gender studies and visual and literary aesthetics. In this important new work, she undertakes an exploration of the nature of the sublime, one of the most important topics in contemporary debates about modernity, politics and art. Through a compelling examination of terror, transcendence and the ‘other’ in key European philosophers and writers, Battersby articulates a radical ‘female sublime’. A central feature of The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference is its engagement with recent debates around ‘9/11’, race and Islam. Battersby shows how, since the eighteenth century, the pleasures of the sublime have been described in terms of the transcendence of terror. Linked to the ‘feminine’, the sublime was closed off to flesh-and-blood women, to ‘Orientals’ and to other supposedly ‘inferior’ human types. Engaging with Kant, Burke, the German Romantics, Nietzsche, Derrida, Lyotard, Irigaray and Arendt, as well as with women writers and artists, Battersby traces the history of these exclusions, while finding resources within the history of western culture for thinking human differences afresh The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference is essential reading for students of continental philosophy, gender studies, aesthetics, literary theory, visual culture, and race and social theory.

Product Description: The sublime – along with beauty the most important aesthetic category of the 18th century – experienced an amazing renaissance in art, philosophy and scholarship at the end of the 20th century. Using the examples of Peter Handke, Christoph Ransmayr, Botho Strauss and Raoul Schrott, the present study shows the extent to which notions of the sublime have proved productive in contemporary literature...read more

Product Description: Traditional approaches to understanding sublimity and skepticism have often asserted the primacy and importance of one concept over the other. However, in Sublimity and Skepticism in Montaigne and Milton, David L. Sedley argues that literary and philosophical notions of skepticism and sublimity simultaneously developed and influenced one another...read more

Product Description: This monograph is a study of the Woolfian approach to the poetics of the sublime as demonstrated in Virginia Woolf's The Waves. This novel was one of the author's experiments in fictive creation and it called for a new poetics of the sublime...read more