Abstract
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, popular interest in the wild places of the world shows no sign of abating.1 Debates about climate change, and catastrophic natural events, such as the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in April 2010, or the tsunami which inundated Japan in March 2011, have ensured that extreme natural phenomena remain at the forefront of the popular imagination, and this despite the ubiquitous foreboding of financial apocalypse.2 Enquiries into the fundamental nature of the physical universe, too, continue to enthral the public — witness the range of popular-science cultural texts dealing with ‘the wonders of the universe’ and the so-called ‘theory of everything’, or the intense media interest surrounding the search for the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider.3 This popular fascination with the ‘natural sublime’, as it came to be known during the eighteenth century, is not new. However, the cultural history of this fascination needs, now, to be re-examined, because the invention of the ‘natural sublime’ during the eighteenth century continues to determine our engagement with ‘nature’ and ‘the natural’, influencing everything from the price of property in Alpine resorts to debates about the positioning of wind farms in areas of outstanding natural beauty, from the creation of national parks at the expense of indigenous populations to the burgeoning commercialisation of ‘pristine’ environments or ‘unspoiled’ travel destinations, and from constructions of the history of Western philosophy to arguments about the canon of ‘Romantic’ literature.4
whereso’er I turn my ravish’d eyes,
Gay gilded scenes and shining prospects rise, Poetic fields encompass me around, And still I seem to tread on classic ground; For here the Muse so oft her harp has strung That not a mountain rears its head unsung, Renown’d in verse each shady thicket grows, And ev’ry stream in heavenly numbers flows.
— Joseph Addison, A Letter from Italy (1701), ll. 9–16
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Notes
See, for example, Gavin De Beer, Early Travellers in the Alps (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1930)
Noah Heringman, Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), p. 9.
Noah Heringman (ed.), Romantic Science: the Literary Forms of Natural History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003).
For an examination of the extent to which the sublime is embedded in a range of genres of writing and areas of enquiry during the late eighteenth century and Romantic period, and of the role of the sublime in the emergence of disciplinarity at that time, see Cian Duffy and Peter Howell (eds), Cultures of the Sublime: Selected Readings, 1750–1830 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
For a useful, recent overview of the place of the sublime in Lacan’s thought, with particular reference to his Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1986), see Philip Shaw, The Sublime (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 131–7.
Peter de Bolla, The Discourse on the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics, and the Subject (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), p. 2.
See Giuseppe Micheli, The Early Reception of Kant’s Thought in England, 1785–1805 (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 1.
For a cultural history of the British experience of the Grand Tour in the eighteenth century and early Romantic period, see Jeremy Black, The British Abroad: the Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century (London: St Martin’s, 1992).
Immanuel Kant’s ‘Analytic of the Sublime’ plays, of necessity, a somewhat lesser part in this process of exchange, however, since it was not widely known in Britain until well into the nineteenth century. See J. H. Stirling and F. A. Nitsch, Kant’s Thought in Britain: the Early Impact (London: Routledge, 1993)
Samuel Holt Monk, The Sublime: a Study of Critical Theories in Eighteenth-Century England (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), p. 4
Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 196.
The contours of the discovery of ‘deep time’ have been extensively documented by Rudwick and others, and I have no intention to rehearse that narrative in any detail here. See also Paolo Rossi, The Dark Abyss of Time, transl. Lydia Cochrane (University of Chicago Press, 1984). The phrase ‘deep time’ was coined by John McPhee in Basin and Range (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1980), p. 20.
George Gordon, Lord Byron, Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie Marchand, 12 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973–82), iii, p. 179.
Francis Spufford, I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination (London: Faber & Faber, 1996), p. 6.
Eric Wilson, The Spiritual History of Ice: Romanticism, Science, and the Imagination (London: Palgrave, 2003), p. 5.
Percy Shelley, The Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Kelvin Everest, Geoffrey Matthews et al., 3 vols to date (London: Longman, 1988–), i, p. 306.
See, for example, Alex Murray, ‘Vestiges of the Phoenix: De Quincey, Kant, and the Heavens’, Victoriographies 1/2 (November 2011), pp. 246–60
Jonathan Smith, ‘De Quincey’s Revisions to “System of the Heavens”’, Victorian Periodicals Review 26/4 (Winter 1993), pp. 203–12.
Thompson, The Suffering Traveller, p. 148. For discussions of these various aspects of travel and travel-writing during the eighteenth century and Romantic period, see, for example, James Buzzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to ‘Culture’, 1800–1918 (Oxford University Press, 1993); Chloe Chard, Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel Writing and Imaginative Geography (Manchester University Press, 1999); and Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing. On the development of’ scientific travel’, see Barbara Stafford, Voyage into Substance: Art, Science, Nature, and the Illustrated Travel Account, 1760–1840 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984).
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Duffy, C. (2013). Introduction: In Search of ‘Classic Ground’. In: The Landscapes of the Sublime, 1700–1830. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137332189_1
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