Legacies Of The Sublime

Pairs literary works with philosophical and theoretical texts to examine how the Kantian sublime influenced authors in their treatments of freedom and subjectivity throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Legacies of the Sublime offers a highly original, subtle, and persuasive account of the aesthetics of the sublime in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature, philosophy, and science. Christopher Kitson reveals the neglected history of how Kant’s theory of the sublime in the Critique of Judgment cast a shadow over the next century and more of literature and thought. In each chapter, close readings weave together literary works with philosophical and scientific ones in order to clarify the complex dialogues between them. Through these readings, Kitson shows how the sublime survived well after the heyday of romanticism as a way of representing human freedom. This new context produces fresh interpretations of canonical literary works, by Thomas Carlyle, H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, and James Joyce, with reference to important theoretical texts by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud. Kitson follows the sublime’s various manifestations and mutations, through the nineteenth century’s industrial grandeur and the vertiginous prospects of deep time, into the early twentieth century’s darkly ironic and uncanny versions. A welcome contribution to the study of the long nineteenth century, this work reveals an unexamined chapter in intellectual history and in the story of the modern self. “Kitson is well versed in the theory of the sublime and demonstrates detailed knowledge and understanding of primary texts and contexts. His close readings of key passages contribute to a richly textured, persuasive argument.” — Philip Shaw, author of The Sublime

In this groundbreaking study, Louis W. Marvick develops a literary criterion for the quality known as "the sublime," considered as the expression of an attitude towards the ideal--an attitude composed of irony and enthusiasm in varying proportions. The author examines the various theories of the sublime and traces the development of the concept from a rhetorical device to an experience of spiritual insight derived from the genius of the artist. The book covers all of the major discussions of the concept, from Longinus, Johnson, Dennis, Burke, and Kant, up to Mallarme. Kant's structural model of the sublime moment is translated into terms suitable for literary analysis. This leads to a meticulous examination of Mallarme's use of the word sublime in his prose writings and the ways in which Mallarme's understanding of the term resembles and diverges from that of his predecessors. This comparative procedure affords an insight into the nature both of Mallarme's literary achievement and of the sublime experience in general.

Shows that the feminist interventions of the Mao era (1949–1976) continue to influence contemporary Chinese women. This book traces how the legacy of the Maoist gender project is experienced or contested by particular Chinese women, remembered or forgotten in their lives, and highlighted or buried in their narratives. Xin Huang examines four women’s life stories: an urban woman who lived through the Mao era (1949–1976), a rural migrant worker, a lesbian artist who has close connections with transnational queer networks, and an urban woman who has lived abroad. The individual narratives are paired with analysis of the historical and social contexts in which each woman lives. Huang focuses on the shifting relationship between gender and class, fashion and shame in the Mao and post-Mao eras, queer desire and artwork, and contemporary transnational encounters. By rethinking the historical significance and contemporary relevance of one of the twentieth century’s major feminist interventions—socialist and Marxist women’s liberation during the Mao years—The Gender Legacy of the Mao Era provides insight into current struggles over gender equality in China and around the world.

The English born artist and writer Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) has received much critical acclaim and achieved stellar status in Mexico, where she lived and worked for most of her life, having fled Europe via Spain in tormenting circumstances. Leonora Carrington: Living Legacies brings together a collection of chapters that constitute a range of artistic, scholarly and creative responses to the realm of Carrington emphasizing how her work becomes a medium, a milieu, and a provocation for new thinking, being and imagining in the world. The diversity of contributions from scholars, early career researchers, and artists, include unpublished papers, interviews, creative provocations, and writing from practice-led interventions. Collectively they explore, question, and enable new ways of thinking with Carrington’s legacy. Wishing to expand on recent important scholarly publications by established Carrington researchers which have brought historical and international significance to the artist’s legacy, this volume offers new perspectives on the artist’s relevance in feminist thinking and artistic methodologies. Conscious of Carrington’s reluctance to engage in critical analysis of her artwork we have approached this scholarly task through a lens of give and return that the artist herself musingly articulates in her 1965 mock-manifesto Jezzamathatics: “I was decubing the root of a Hyperbollick Symposium … when the latent metamorphosis blurted the great unexpected shriek into something between a squeak and a smile. IT GAVE, so to speak, in order to return.” (Aberth, 2010:149). In adopting her playful conjecture, this publication seeks to bring Carrington and her work to further prominence.

This book visits the Romantic legacy that was central to the development of literature and culture from the 1830s onward. Although critical accounts have examined aspects of this long history of indebtedness, this is the first study to survey both Nineteenth and Twentieth century culture. The authors consider the changing notion of Romanticism, looking at the diversity of its writers, the applicability of the term, and the ways in which Romanticism has been reconstituted. The chapters cover relevant historical periods and literary trends, including the Romantic Gothic, the Victorian era, and Modernism as part of a dialectical response to the Romantic legacy. Contributors also examine how Romanticism has been reconstituted within postmodern and postcolonial literature as both a reassessment of the Modernist critique and of the imperial contexts that have throughout this time-frame underpinned the Romantic legacy, bringing into focus the contemporaneity of Romanticism and its political legacy. This collection reveals the diversity and continuing relevance of the genre in new and exciting ways, offering insights into writers such as Browning, Ruskin, Pater, Wilde, Lewis, MacNeice, and Auster.

What has contemporary China inherited from its revolutionary past? How do the realities and memories, aesthetics and practices of the Mao era still reverberate in the post-Mao cultural landscape? The essays in this volume propose “red legacies” as a new critical framework from which to examine the profusion of cultural productions and afterlives of the communist revolution in order to understand China’s continuities and transformations from socialism to postsocialism. Organized into five parts—red foundations, red icons, red classics, red bodies, and red shadows—the book’s interdisciplinary contributions focus on visual and performing arts, literature and film, language and thought, architecture, museums, and memorials. Mediating at once unfulfilled ideals and unmourned ghosts across generations, red cultural legacies suggest both inheritance and debt, and can be mobilized to support as well as to critique the status quo.

The work of the acclaimed visionary artist Eugene Berman taps into a fascinating and little-known undercurrent in twentieth-century aesthetics. Variously labeled neo-Romantics, fantacists, neo-humanists, and magic realists, Berman and his peers ignored the formalist dicta of modernism to explore lyrical, emotive, and highly personal realms deemed the "melancholic sublime." In High Drama, Michael Duncan's exploration of the beliefs, styles, and legacy of the "melancholic sublime," and the biographies and reproductions of the work of thirty-five artists, complete a thorough look at a school of great interest, ripe for rediscovery by today's museum-goers and readers. The remarkable paintings and drawings of Eugene Berman seem at first glance to delineate a self-contained, private realm. But, in truth, his precise depictions of decadent beauty and ruin reflect an attitude towards the past thatis shared by a fascinating array of artist from both his own time and today. 75 colour & 50 b/w illustrations