Romantic Sublime and Middle-Class Subjectivity in the Victorian Novel
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A01=Stephen Hancock
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aesthetic theory analysis
Alastor Poet
Amy Dorrit
Arthur Clennam
Author_Stephen Hancock
Burkean Empiricism
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Category=DS
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Category=DSK
Claim Universal Validity
Dead Men
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eq_biography-true-stories
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feminine moral authority
Feminine Sublime
gendered power dynamics
George III
idua
imaginat
imity
ind
ine
Infinite Division
Infinitely Divisible
ion
King George III
mascul
Masculine Sublime
masculine sublimity
middle class ideology
Miss Wade
moral authority
Romantic Sublime
romanticism to Victorian transition
Shelley's Work
small
sublime in middle-class identity formation
Sublime Woman
Sue Bridehead
surveillance in nineteenth century
Tragic Flaw
Transcendent Phallus
Universal Faculty
Victorian literature criticism
Victorian periods
woman
Wordsworthian Sublime
Young Man
Product details
- ISBN 9780415975452
- Weight: 560g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 16 Aug 2005
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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This study follows the aesthetic of the sublime from Burke and Kant, through Wordsworth and the Shelleys, into Thackeray, Dickens, Eliot and Hardy. Exploring the continuities between the romantic and Victorian "periods" that have so often been rather read as differences, the book demonstrate that the sublime mode enables the transition from a paradigm of overwhelming power exemplified by the body of the king to the pervasive power of surveillance utilized by the rising middle classes. While the domestic woman connected with the rise of the middle class is normally seen as beautiful, the book contends that the moral authority given to this icon of depth and interiority is actually sublime. The binary of the beautiful and the sublime seeks to contain the sublimity of womanhood by insisting on sublimity's masculine character. This is the book's most important claim: rather than exemplifying masculine strength, the sublime marks the transition to a system of power gendered as feminine and yet masks that transition because it fears the power it ostensibly accords to the feminine. This aesthetic is both an inheritance the Victorians receive from their romantic predecessors, and, more importantly, a broad historical phenomenon that questions the artificial boundaries between romantic and Victorian.
