Bloomsbury The Sublime Reader

Review The Sublime Reader fills a long-standing gap in the available resources for teaching and thinking about aesthetics. It is the first collection of extracts that sets ancient treatments of beauty, awe or wonder into dialogue with the more familiar eighteenth-century European discussion of the sublime and our own contemporary debates about the effects and value of aesthetic form and objects. This collection will expand the field as its deft and thoughtful juxtapositions stimulate further explorations in our understanding of what it means to be struck by wonder.Peter de Bolla, Professor of Cultural History and Aesthetics, University of Cambridge, UKThe Sublime Reader is a much needed first comprehensive anthology dedicated to the aesthetic sublime. The texts are masterfully selected with a view to covering a long history, from ancient to contemporary works in Western and Eastern aesthetic traditions, and to presenting a wide range of accounts of the experience and judgment of natural and artistic sublimity. This is an invaluable resource for students, instructors, the general audience seeking depth and breadth in the fascinating subject of the sublime.Uygar Abaci, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, The Pennsylvania State University, USARobert Clewis has done heroic work in collecting the full range of important materials about the sublime from philosophy, art history, poetry, and criticism and in ably introducing them. This collection makes it possible for the first time to think systematically about special experiences of excitation, threat, and accession to power in a time when, for better and for worse, disruption looms large in many cultural and political agendas.Richard Eldridge, Charles and Harriett Cox McDowell Professor of Philosophy, Swarthmore College, USA Product Description This is the first English-language anthology to provide a compendium of primary source material on the sublime. The book takes a chronological approach, covering the earliest ancient traditions up through the early and late modern periods and into contemporary theory. It takes an inclusive, interdisciplinary approach to this key concept in aesthetics and criticism, representing voices and traditions that have often been excluded. As such, it will be of use and interest across the humanities and allied disciplines, from art criticism and literary theory, to gender and cultural studies and environmental philosophy. The anthology includes brief introductions to each selection, reading and discussion questions, suggestions for further reading, a bibliography and index making it an ideal text for building a course around or for further study. The books apparatus provides valuable context for exploring the history and contemporary views of the sublime. About the Author Robert Clewis is author of The Kantian Sublime and the Revelation of Freedom (2009), a translator in Kant's Lectures on Anthropology (2012), and editor of Reading Kant's Lectures (2015). He teaches philosophy and is Director of the Honors Program at Gwynedd Mercy University and is an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow.