Romantic totality. William Blake's materialities ; Mary Shelley's bodies ; Thomas De Quincey's identifications -- Modernist alterity. T.S. Eliot's intensities : The waste land ; Virginia Woolf's disjunctions : Mrs Dalloway ; Djuna Barnes's night life : Nightwood -- Postmodern temporality. Thomas Pynchon's entropy : The crying of lot 49 ; D.M. Thomas's anamnesis : The white hotel ; Toni Morrison's belatedness : Beloved.
Summary:
"Reinventing the Sublime looks at 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, including '9/11'. It reads Burke and Kant alongside postmodern discourses on the sublime, and Wordsworth, De Quincey and Mary Shelley in relation to temporality and materiality in Romanticism, and considers 'modernist' inflections of the sublime in T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes in relation to the themes of disjunction and excess in modernity. The author examines the postmodern revisiting of the sublime in Thomas Pynchon, D.M Thomas and Toni Morrison, and draws on Lyotard's reading of the sublime as an aesthetic of the avant-garde and as a singular and disruptive 'event', to argue that the sublime in its postmodern and contemporary forms encodes an anxious but affirmative relationship to the ironies of temporality and history." -- Publisher website.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.