Abstract
We have seen how in Frankenstein a dead language is brought back to life. This is a resurrection of the dead science of Albertus Magnus, Paracelsus and Cornelius Agrippa. This idea of using the past in order to define the present is something which Mary Shelley also explores in two of her tales, ‘Valerius: the Reanimated Roman’ and ‘The Mortal Immortal: a Tale’. As in Frankenstein, it is the return of the past which unsettles the sublime in these tales, but before looking at them in detail it is helpful to explore Walter Jackson Bate’s contention that the remnants of a Classical culture can be found within Romantic thought. Bate’s argument provides us, indirectly, with an explanation as to why the Romantics’ attachment to the past destabilises the Romantic sublime.
Keywords
Historical Displacement Classical Culture Modern Thought Incest Taboo Progressive InternalisationPreview
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Notes
- 1.Walter Jackson Bate, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (London: Chatto & Windus, 1971).Google Scholar
- 2.David Hume, ‘Of the Rise and the Progress of the Arts and Sciences’ in Of the Standard of Taste and Other Essays, ed. John W. Lenz (Indiana: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965) pp. 70–94Google Scholar
- 3.Velleius Paterculus, The History of Rome (C.AD 4) trans, and intro. Frederich W. Shipley (London: Heinemann, 1890) p. ix.Google Scholar
- 4.Mary Shelley, ‘Valerius: the Reanimated Roman’ in Mary Shelley: Collected Tales and Stories, ed. Charles E. Robinson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976) pp. 332–44.Google Scholar
- 5.Marcus Antoninus Aurelius, The Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus (C.AD 170) trans. A.S.L. Farquharson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1944) pp. 292–3.Google Scholar
- 6.Mary Shelley, ‘The Mortal Immortal: a Tale’ in Mary Shelley: Collected Tales and Stories, ed. Charles E. Robinson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976) pp. 219–30Google Scholar
- 7.See Friedrich Schiller, ‘On the Sublime’, in On the Sublime & Naive and Sentimental Poetry (1793–95), trans. J.A. Elias (New York: Ungar, 1975) pp. 191–212.Google Scholar