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With its multifaceted treatment of word, image and sound, Eugen Napoleon Neureuther’s art stood at the forefront of the Romantic craze for arabesque illustrations of ballad albums and title pages for scores. Taking Neureuther as its prime example, this essay argues for an area of Romantic experimentation that, skeptical about claims of the absolute and yearnings for the sublime, understood the musicalization of the visual arts as analogy rather than synesthesia, and located the Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) in moments of ordinary life. As an ornamental design, the arabesque possessed both scriptural and pictorial qualities—a double nature that facilitated the Romantic inversion of visual motives into textual strategies. Yet sound also plays a powerful role throughout Neureuther’s lithographic work. A distinctive approach to the creation of synchrony is his subtle yet highly innovative contribution to the modernist desire of art’s musicalization. Neureuther’s ability to unify all elements—letter, note, image—in stylistic terms ensures that the shape of each line, whatever its signification or signifying power, corresponds to all others on the page. The result: a holistic integration of script, notation, and mimetic gesture. The unity of the arts becomes the unity of the printmaker’s mark.

From the beginning – or at least the time of the so-called “Norman Anonymous” writing in the 12th century – there was a contradiction at work, in whether to see such figures as genuinely possessing two natures or really unified in one. For Santner argues that the very modernist trope of the representation-of-the-lack-of-representation itself constitutes “an almost defiling contact with the flesh that one has torn free from the king’s sublime physiology and claimed for the People”. Camus refers to “the prisoners of the plague”, and there is a certain misleading, but convincing, universality that is also, in some ineffable way, the collective universality heralded by Badiou and Zizek. It may indeed be that collectivity which is called into being by the pandemic.

The idea of freedom is definitive for both Kant’s definition of beauty and his description of the sublime. In beauty, humans experience a free lawfulness: a state in which we are guided by but not restricted to conceptual analysis. In the sublime, we are reminded of the freedom that allows us to transcend even the fear of death. Although Hegel’s definition of freedom and his philosophy of art differ significantly from Kant’s, the idea that art allows us to experience freedom is common to both philosophers. Humans’ understanding of freedom is pivotal to the emergence of artistic genres from the Egyptian sphinx to the romantic novel, according to Hegel; it also explains the joy we experience through painting and especially through poetry. This essay will trace this Kantian inheritance in Hegel’s thought.

An account of Edmund Burke’s central ideas about the Sublime and the Beautiful shows how the emphasis Burke gave to terror helped to shape the Gothic fiction of Ann Radcliffe and Mary Shelley. Focusing on examples from the poetry of William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Charlotte Smith, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and John Clare, the remainder of this essay explores the ways in which Romantic poets both thought about and attempted to represent those elements of the sublime that were instigated by their encounters with the natural world. What emerges as defining about these interactions between the mind and world is how imaginative impulses towards a sense of the sublime often led to a renewed sense of the material world and the very contingencies of existence they sought to transcend. Even Wordsworth’s more reverential response to the natural world as sacrosanct recognises the ‘awe’ of the sublime can be as much consoling as it is disturbing. These disturbing aspects of natural process and the sublime are self-consciously explored in the poetry of Shelley, who subjects notions of transcendence and idealism to sceptical scrutiny. With varying degrees of emphases, the poetry of Byron, Smith, and Clare elide distinctions between nature and culture to acknowledge a sublime more explicitly shaped by temporal and material processes. Finally, a key episode in Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale is read as exemplifying the many difficulties and complexities of the Romantic imagination’s encounter with, and its attempts, to represent transcendence and the sublime.

The Wells-James debate about the function of the novel has influenced decades of formalist and humanist criticism that has elevated Henry James as the quintessential ethical stylist and struggled to come to terms with H.G. Wells's literary artistry. This article reevaluates Wells's early fiction as the work of a self-conscious stylist who developed a politically and ethically motivated aesthetic that it calls 'adjustment-style.' It then highlights Wells's significance for a modernist-influenced strand of twenty-first-century writing from which critical common sense has excluded him as forebear, by reading the confluences between his work and that of Ali Smith. In doing so it aims to add nuances to the emergent conceptualisation of the metamodern novel which, it argues, is characterised by its own forms of adjustment-style. It contends that a close reading of Smith's metamodern style makes Wells more visible in our view of the contemporary novel; just as placing Smith in a continuum with Wells illuminates her own distinctive style and challenges many of the familiar novelistic binaries that have been extrapolated from the Wells-James debate.

From Kant to postmodernism the idea of the sublime was always tied with questions of ethics and politics. Kant saw the sublime as a proof that rationality triumphs over nature, validating law and judgement through the subjective experience of pleasure and pain. Lyotard saw in the sublime a symptom of a crisis at which rationality reaches its limit, and subjectivity is confronted with its own collapse. As this chapter will show, both these approaches are inadequate to account for the sublime in 21st century. The failure of liberal democracy and the rise of populist and fascist ideologies calls for a re-evaluation of the sublime as the dissolution of the symbolic order and the coming face to face with the alternative reality of the death drive. This chapter names this reality ‘The Diogenes Complex’, after the homeless beggar who made his form of existence the manifestation of his philosophical creed. Through his performative actions Diogenes has shown that reality is sublime because it is irreconcilable with rational logic and warned against the futility of trying to act rationally in irrational times.

Notions of the sublime are most often associated with the extraordinary, and include the intra-psychic, high-cultural and exceptional occurrences of elation and exaltation as part of the experience. Using psychoanalytic and aesthetic theories, this book aims to revitalise the sublime by re-evaluating its significance for contemporary life and, in a unique and fascinating endeavour, opens up a space that explores the sublime in the ordinary, everyday and quotidian. Through the exploration of familiar (i.e. love, death, art and nature) and unfamiliar (pornography, education and politics) threads of the sublime experience, this book posits the sublime as invoking an ordinary human response which contains minute, inter-psychic, inclusive and even mass-media cultural elements, and carries within it therapeutic and political potential. It explores loving and caring, as well as hateful, traumatic and destructive encounters with the sublime, demonstrating how it can overflow and destabilise our psychological and social symbolic structures and expose their fictional and constructed nature, but also shows it as something we can engage with in order to re-create and heal ourselves, above and beyond what any 'given' form of reality can offer us. Demonstrating the urgent need to understand the sublime as something that is immanent in our everyday life, a source of energy and inspiration that can be invoked to support our mental health and well-being, this book will be of great interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and art therapists, as well as scholars and students of philosophy and popular culture.

Jivaji uses a Lacanian theoretical frame to situate the ‘sublime’ in relation to the notion of the ‘subject’ and then interrogates ethnographic data produced within a school mathematics classroom. In this space, the subject is located with respect to an inferred ideal subject or ‘sublime object’. This relation is constitutively discordant and productive of interruptions to efforts at occupying the positive properties of this sublime object. It is suggested that these moments of interruption reveal the immanent, otherwise veiled, presence of shame as structured into the school classroom as a means to police socio-historically specific behavioural norms.

Curk’s chapter explores the everyday sublime through the experience of playing with another. It links Winnicott’s theory of playing with Wittgenstein’s ideas of ethics as represented by the experience of wonder. In both cases, the experience is not something that can, or should, be captured by an ordinary use of language, but requires a certain awareness of nonsensicality, miraculous-ness. For Winnicott, this is part of the transitional space of creativity and discovery, which, similar to theories of the sublime in psychoanalysis refers to openness to creation, surprise, and deviation from the expected.

This chapter examines Richard Rorty's characterization of feminist practice as linguistic innovation in the mode of prophecy. In a series of essays written in the mid-to-late 1980s, including those collected in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, the series in the London Review of Books, and others scattered in various scholarly journals, Rorty elaborated what many of us found to be a surprisingly dichotomous view of cultural and discursive space. He cast public life, and by implication politics, as the sphere of utility and solidarity, in which it would be irresponsible to forsake the established language of "the community" for the sublime heights of poetic transgression and originality. By teasing out some connections between feminism and pragmatism, Rorty's lecture represents the beginnings of a major new positive development in his own thought. It also represents a potential contribution to feminist theory. But Rorty fails fully to develop the political implications of his insight.

“‘Sometimes,’” Binh tells Sweet Sunday Man and, by extension, readers in Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt , “‘it is better to crave’” (237). The introduction to Michelin-starred chef Anita Lo’s 2018 cookbook SOLO: A Modern Cookbook for a Party of One opens with an unabashed proclamation: “I put the ‘Lo’ in ‘solo,’ the A Lo in ‘alone” (xi). Over 236 pages, Lo serves course after course of mouth-watering but sagaciously-portioned dishes, judiciously peppered with witty commentary about the dishes’ names, their origins, and the nature of love. Some are American classics (Mac and Two Cheeses) and others are classical French (Chocolate Pain Perdue). Then there are the recipes Lo recreated from her mother’s (Steamed Sea Bass with Shiitake) and ones she has acquired through her travels (Pork and Squid Glass Noodles). But Lo also admits she “still sometimes feel rebellious pangs when [she] get[s] one too many requests to speak about Chinese food or cook something Asian, as [she] trained in France and worked at both Bouley and Chanterelle” (23), and pushes back against gustatory expectations with distinctly fusion dishes like her “Avocado and Sunchoke Ochazuke” (6). Fighting against strict categorizations of her food, Lo opens a conversation about hyphenated marginalized people either being confined to one type of cuisine (and one aspect of their identities) or diluting every aspect to make a weak imitation of the different components (and never really fitting in). Asian-French fusion cuisine is a particularly complicated topic, marked by multiple points of convergence; the resulting dishes and narratives are often flavored by long histories of colonialism and racism, privilege and taste. While the goal is always to raise the humblest dish to the level of the sublime, the taste nevertheless carries with it memories. Author Kim Thuy prefaced her cookbook Secrets from My Vietnamese Kitchen by disclosing how she “depend[s] on food to express as best [she] can [her] unconditional love,”’ tying together “secrets” and maternal love with “simple recipes” and a lost homeland (viii). Lo’s and Thuy’s cookbooks provide key insight into Asian (specifically, Chinese and Vietnamese), French, and Asian-French fusion cuisine. I analyze Lo and Thuy’s commentary about the impact diaspora can have upon both taste and memories and use this lens to analyze Monique Truong’s 2003 novel The Book of Salt and the dishes Binh tastes and prepares while exiled to France from Vietnam. Over a dinner of “[s]alt-and-pepper shrimp finished in a glaze of browned butter,” “[morel] mushrooms hidden below the haricots verts” that were “sauteed with garlic and ginger,” and watercress finished with “fleur de sel” (96–98), Truong reveals this chef (really, all of the chefs in her novel) “will always cook from all the places where he has been. It is his way of remembering the world” (98). Because food is so intimately tied with love and memories in Solo, Secrets from My Vietnamese Kitchen, as well as The Book of Salt, I also analyze how absence (of an ingredient, of a homeland, of a person, of a taste) can only heighten a diasporic longing for a replacement. Sometimes, substitutions are necessities, and the taste that results is the fusion of memories in order to combat loneliness in a land where neither the taste nor love is familiar.

This chapter examines the creation of a “popular sublime” focusing particularly on Albert Operti, who accompanied Robert Peary’s 1890s Arctic expeditions. Nineteenth-century images of the Arctic translated the sublime from aesthetic discourse to entertainment while also transforming explorers such as John Franklin, Elijah Kent Kane, or Robert Peary into household names. A self-dubbed “Arctic historical painter,” Operti crafted a visual corpus that presented the Arctic both in museum galleries and in popular media, ranging from magazine illustrations to dioramas to penny tobacco cards. Operti’s project, the chapter argues, bolstered the public imaginary of the Arctic as a sublime landscape even as the region became more mapped and more accessible.

The thesis of the ‘spectacular death’ assumes spectatorship, and corresponds with the theories on the theatre of terror, which emphasises the centrality of sublime death and the engagement with the spectators. According to these approaches, terrorism elicits spectacular death imageries that both coax the media and coerce collaboration with the perpetrators. Until recently, terrorists were dependent on mass media in reaching out to ‘audiences’; however, the terror attacks at Christchurch (NZ) and Halle (Germany), in which the perpetrators were livestreaming the attacks on social media, is yet another phase in the struggle around the visibility of death and its contextualisation. This chapter explores the rise of terrorism as a spectacular death via new media, and the ethical challenges for the players involved. The discussion situates these representations of violent death within a broader historical framework of spectacular death and mediated thanatopolitics (politics of death), and explicates their adequacy and downsides. The chapter concludes by arguing that the removal of news organisations from the chain of circulation of newsworthy events results in the desecration of death. While media rituals of grievability allow the realignment of solidarity and human connectivity, the (society of the) spectacle reduces death to its representation and overstates its entertaining function.

The study of gender and feminism in the field of translation studies has highlighted women’s position as translators and creators of meaning and has opened the way for questioning established norms created by the dominant male voice. This chapter discusses how three female translators of the Qur’an challenge patriarchal gender hierarchies through their renditions of the sacred text of Islam. The first translator is Fatma Zaida, a slave maid, who translated the Qur’an into French (L’Alkoran: Le Livre Par Excellence (1860)). The second is Camille Adams Helminski, a Western convert to Islam (The Light of Dawn (1999)). The third and most recent female translator of the Qur’an is Laleh Bakhtiar, a Western convert to Islam, who used her translation The Sublime Quran (2007) to re-read some of the most controversial gender-related verses in the sacred text. To illustrate some of the key feminist strategies and theories adopted by these translators, the chapter briefly discusses the paratextual and extra-textual material accompanying their translations. It then focuses on two areas: the translation strategies, which share striking similarities with strategies advocated and employed by feminist translators/theorists, and the interpretations of gender-related verses which are compared to readings provided by leading Islamic feminist scholars.

Contents: Preface. Beauty as the Beast: traditional and postmodern expressions: Beauty and the postmodern Beauty as the beast in Christian traditions Hebrew and Christian iconoclasms. Beauty as Being: The Irrepressible Character of Beauty: The 'great theory of beauty' The Olympian cosmogonies The Platonic tradition The 'great theory' in the Middle Ages The process transmutation of the great theory of beauty beauty as being. Beauty as Sensibility: Precursors of the 18th-century turn The new problematic of beauty in the 18th century The psychological relocation of beauty The problem of taste The sublime Legacies and ambiguities. Beauty as Benevolence: Primary and secondary beauty Beauty as community Beauty and God The problem of objectivity Beauty and self-transcendence. Beauty in Human Self-Transcendence: Human self-transcendence without beauty Self-transcendence as passionate subjectivity Self-transcendence as intentional meaning Self-transcendence as radical responsibility The aesthetic aspect of self-transcendence Beauty as a transcendental condition of experience Beyond self-preoccupation through beauty The beauty of the graceful body Summary. Paths to Beauty in 20th-Century Theology: Anti-aesthetic Protestant approaches to beauty 20th-century Catholic theologies of beauty. The Beauty of Human Redemption: The image of God as self-transcendence Formal and ethical self-transcendence The image of God as potentiality and actuality The imago dei as beautiful The despoiled image The beauty of redemptive remaking Redemptive self-transcendence Surmounting the dichotomy of the ethical and the aesthetic Faith's aesthetic sensibilities. Beauty, Pathos and Joy: Beauty and pathos Joy: beyond the dichotomy of rigorism and satisfaction Faith without beauty The arts in the life of faith. Synopsis: Aesthetics Beauty The western story of beauty Theological aesthetics and redemptive transformation Index.

This book illuminates the original meanings of seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century mural paintings in Britain. At the time, these were called ‘histories’. Throughout the eighteenth century, though, the term became directly associated with easel painting and, as ‘history painting’ achieved the status of a sublime genre, any link with painted architectural interiors was lost. Whilst both genres contained historical figures and narratives, it was the ways of viewing them that differed. Lydia Hamlett emphasises the way that mural paintings were experienced by spectators within their architectural settings. New iconographical interpretations and theories of effect and affect are considered an important part of their wider historical, cultural and social contexts. This book is intended to be read primarily by specialists, graduate and undergraduate students with an interest in new approaches to British art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

This chapter examines the 1986 nuclear accident at Chernobyl, Ukraine, as a “hyper-event”—an event that triggers chain reactions that rearrange agential relations operating on multiple spatial and temporal scales. The scales examined include the bio-cultural region of north-central Polissia; the state-level national imaginary of Ukraine in its late Soviet and early independence eras; the military–industrial system of the USSR within the Cold War political order; and the technological modernity of the era increasingly known as the Anthropocene. Media are seen to play a role in each of these layers: in the visuality of the Soviet nuclear sublime, in media treatments of Ukraine in the post-cold war global information (dis)order, in the cinematics of the postnuclear and posthuman “Zone,” and in visualizations of the Anthropocene.

Introduction: in times of nostalgia: the brave new world of a grand old emotion Michael Hviid Jacobsen Part 1: Conceptual and theoretical perspectives on nostalgia 1. Nostalgia: the paradoxical bittersweet emotion Krystine Irene Batcho 2. The psychology of nostalgia: delineating the emotion's nature and functions Tim Wildschut and Constantine Sedikides 3. Future imaginings: nostalgia for unrealized possible selves Janelle L. Wilson 4. Retrotopia rising: the topics of utopia, retrotopia and nostalgia in the sociology of Zygmunt Bauman Michael Hviid Jacobsen Part 2: Memory, politics and social critique in a mediatised era 5. Dangerous memories: nostalgia and the historical sublime Steven T. Ostovich 6. The dilemmas of radical nostalgia: acknowledging the power of the past in the politics of the Left Alastair Bonnett 7. The political staging of nostalgia: neo-Ottomanism in contemporary Turkey Yagmur Karakaya 8. The future of nostalgia is inevitable: reflections on mediated nostalgia Ryan Lizardi Part 3: Consumerism, migration and everyday life 9. The darkside of nostalgic bonds: moral motivators of consumer identities, decisions and behaviours Stacey Menzel Baker and Courtney Nations Azzari 10. Transmigratory nostalgia: sentimentality and everyday life on the Japan Exchange and Teaching programme Sharleen Estampador-Hughson 11. Living in nostalgia: exploring expatriate experiences of everyday nostalgia in Pattaya Michael Hviid Jacobsen

Nostalgia is a central topic in the social scientific study of emotions. It also is important in related attempts to understand human existence in time characteristic of history, philosophy, and literature. Longing for an impossible return home can be an experience of the historical sublime that is dangerous to the plausibility structures of the present insofar as nostalgia leads us to think and act on the basis of an awareness of other possibilities for the future contained in the past. Research on nostalgia stresses its social quality – shared positive experiences and the memories of these experiences can be strong triggers of positive feelings about the past in the present. But this social element should not be confused with the political power of nostalgia. Nostalgia as a feeling of yearning for the past, a past concerning which, in light of Frank Ankersmit’s understanding of the historical sublime, there is no closure.