Solitude and the Sublime

As interest in aesthetic experience evolved in the eighteenth century, discussions of the sublime located two opposed accounts of its place and use. Ferguson traces these two positions - the Burkean empiricist account and the Kantian formalist one - to argue that they had significance of aesthetics, including recent deconstructive and New Historicist criticism. Chapter 1 An Introduction to the Sublime; Chapter 2 The Sublime of Edmund Burke, or The Bathos of Experience; Chapter 3 Burke to Kant: A Judgment Outside Comparison; Chapter 4 The Gothicism of the Gothic Novel; Chapter 5 Malthus, Godwin, Wordsworth, and the Spirit of Solitude; Chapter 6 In Search of the Natural Sublime: The Face on the Forest Floor; Chapter 7 Historicism, Deconstruction, and Wordsworth; Index;