Challenge of the Sublime: From Burke's Philosophical Enquiry to British Romantic Art

The book explores the links between the Romantic period in Britain's visual inventiveness and eighteenth-century theories of the sublime, challenging visual artists to explore new themes, compositional strategies, and media. It also calls into question mimetic representational models, causing artists to reflect on the presentation of the unpresentable and the process of artistic production.

Format: Hardback
Length: 336 pages
Publication date: 05 February 2018
Publisher: Manchester University Press

This book examines the links between the unprecedented visual inventiveness of the Romantic period in Britain and eighteenth-century theories of the sublime. Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), in particular, is shown to have directly or indirectly challenged visual artists to explore not just new themes, but also new compositional strategies and visual media such as panoramas and book illustrations, by arguing that the sublime was beyond the reach of painting. More significantly, it began to call into question mimetic representational models, causing artists to reflect about the presentation of the unpresentable and drawing attention to the process of artistic production itself, rather than the finished artwork.

Weight: 538g
Dimension: 146 x 251 x 30 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781526117397