Author: Barbara Claire Freeman
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520919092
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 215
Book Description
The Feminine Sublime provides a new and startling insight into the modes and devices employed in the creation of women's fiction since the eighteenth century. Barbara Claire Freeman argues that traditional theorizations of the sublime depend upon unexamined assumptions about femininity and sexual difference, and that the sublime could not exist without misogynistic constructions of "the feminine." Taking this as her starting point, Freeman suggests that the "other sublime" that comes into view from this new perspective not only offers a crucial way to approach representations of excess in women's fiction, but allows us to envision other modes of writing the sublime. Freeman reconsiders Longinus, Burke, Kant, Weiskel, Hertz, and Derrida while also engaging a wide range of women's fiction, including novels by Chopin, Morrison, Rhys, Shelley, and Wharton. Addressing the coincident rise of the novel and concept of the sublime in eighteenth-century European culture, Freeman allies the articulation of sublime experience with questions of agency and passion in modern and contemporary women's fiction. Arguments that have seemed merely to explain the sublime also functioned to evaluate, domesticate, and ultimately exclude an otherness that is almost always gendered as feminine. Freeman explores the ways in which fiction by American and British women, mainly of the twentieth century, responds to and redefines what the tradition has called "the sublime." This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1996. The Feminine Sublime provides a new and startling insight into the modes and devices employed in the creation of women's fiction since the eighteenth century. Barbara Claire Freeman argues that traditional theorizations of the sublime depend upon u
The Feminine Sublime
Author: Barbara Claire Freeman
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520919092
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 215
Book Description
The Feminine Sublime provides a new and startling insight into the modes and devices employed in the creation of women's fiction since the eighteenth century. Barbara Claire Freeman argues that traditional theorizations of the sublime depend upon unexamined assumptions about femininity and sexual difference, and that the sublime could not exist without misogynistic constructions of "the feminine." Taking this as her starting point, Freeman suggests that the "other sublime" that comes into view from this new perspective not only offers a crucial way to approach representations of excess in women's fiction, but allows us to envision other modes of writing the sublime. Freeman reconsiders Longinus, Burke, Kant, Weiskel, Hertz, and Derrida while also engaging a wide range of women's fiction, including novels by Chopin, Morrison, Rhys, Shelley, and Wharton. Addressing the coincident rise of the novel and concept of the sublime in eighteenth-century European culture, Freeman allies the articulation of sublime experience with questions of agency and passion in modern and contemporary women's fiction. Arguments that have seemed merely to explain the sublime also functioned to evaluate, domesticate, and ultimately exclude an otherness that is almost always gendered as feminine. Freeman explores the ways in which fiction by American and British women, mainly of the twentieth century, responds to and redefines what the tradition has called "the sublime." This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1996. The Feminine Sublime provides a new and startling insight into the modes and devices employed in the creation of women's fiction since the eighteenth century. Barbara Claire Freeman argues that traditional theorizations of the sublime depend upon u
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520919092
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 215
Book Description
The Feminine Sublime provides a new and startling insight into the modes and devices employed in the creation of women's fiction since the eighteenth century. Barbara Claire Freeman argues that traditional theorizations of the sublime depend upon unexamined assumptions about femininity and sexual difference, and that the sublime could not exist without misogynistic constructions of "the feminine." Taking this as her starting point, Freeman suggests that the "other sublime" that comes into view from this new perspective not only offers a crucial way to approach representations of excess in women's fiction, but allows us to envision other modes of writing the sublime. Freeman reconsiders Longinus, Burke, Kant, Weiskel, Hertz, and Derrida while also engaging a wide range of women's fiction, including novels by Chopin, Morrison, Rhys, Shelley, and Wharton. Addressing the coincident rise of the novel and concept of the sublime in eighteenth-century European culture, Freeman allies the articulation of sublime experience with questions of agency and passion in modern and contemporary women's fiction. Arguments that have seemed merely to explain the sublime also functioned to evaluate, domesticate, and ultimately exclude an otherness that is almost always gendered as feminine. Freeman explores the ways in which fiction by American and British women, mainly of the twentieth century, responds to and redefines what the tradition has called "the sublime." This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1996. The Feminine Sublime provides a new and startling insight into the modes and devices employed in the creation of women's fiction since the eighteenth century. Barbara Claire Freeman argues that traditional theorizations of the sublime depend upon u
The Feminine Sublime
Author: Barbara Claire Freeman
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520088634
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 218
Book Description
The Feminine Sublime provides the first comprehensive feminist critique of the theory of the sublime. Barbara Claire Freeman argues that traditional theorizations of the sublime depend on unexamined assumptions about femininity and sexual difference, and that the sublime could not exist without misogynistic constructions of "the feminine". Taking this as her starting point, Freeman suggests that the "other sublime" that comes into view from this new perspective not only offers a crucial way to approach representations of excess in women's fiction but allows us to envision other modes of writing the sublime. Freeman reconsiders Longinus, Burke, Kant, Weiskel, Hertz, and Derrida and at the same time engages a wide range of women's fiction, including novels by Chopin, Morrison, Rhys, Shelley, and Wharton. Locating her project in the coincident rise of the novel and concept of the sublime in eighteenth-century European culture, Freeman allies the articulation of sublime experience with questions of agency, passion, and alterity in modern and contemporary women's fiction. She argues that the theoretical discourses that have seemed merely to explain the sublime also function to evaluate, domesticate, and ultimately exclude an otherness that, almost without exception, is gendered as feminine. Just as important, she explores the ways in which fiction by American and British women, mainly of the twentieth century, responds to and redefines what the tradition has called "the sublime".
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520088634
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 218
Book Description
The Feminine Sublime provides the first comprehensive feminist critique of the theory of the sublime. Barbara Claire Freeman argues that traditional theorizations of the sublime depend on unexamined assumptions about femininity and sexual difference, and that the sublime could not exist without misogynistic constructions of "the feminine". Taking this as her starting point, Freeman suggests that the "other sublime" that comes into view from this new perspective not only offers a crucial way to approach representations of excess in women's fiction but allows us to envision other modes of writing the sublime. Freeman reconsiders Longinus, Burke, Kant, Weiskel, Hertz, and Derrida and at the same time engages a wide range of women's fiction, including novels by Chopin, Morrison, Rhys, Shelley, and Wharton. Locating her project in the coincident rise of the novel and concept of the sublime in eighteenth-century European culture, Freeman allies the articulation of sublime experience with questions of agency, passion, and alterity in modern and contemporary women's fiction. She argues that the theoretical discourses that have seemed merely to explain the sublime also function to evaluate, domesticate, and ultimately exclude an otherness that, almost without exception, is gendered as feminine. Just as important, she explores the ways in which fiction by American and British women, mainly of the twentieth century, responds to and redefines what the tradition has called "the sublime".
The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference
Author: Christine Battersby
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134753799
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 235
Book Description
Christine Battersby is a leading thinker in the field of philosophy, gender studies and visual and literary aesthetics. In this important new work, she undertakes an exploration of the nature of the sublime, one of the most important topics in contemporary debates about modernity, politics and art. Through a compelling examination of terror, transcendence and the ‘other’ in key European philosophers and writers, Battersby articulates a radical ‘female sublime’. A central feature of The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference is its engagement with recent debates around ‘9/11’, race and Islam. Battersby shows how, since the eighteenth century, the pleasures of the sublime have been described in terms of the transcendence of terror. Linked to the ‘feminine’, the sublime was closed off to flesh-and-blood women, to ‘Orientals’ and to other supposedly ‘inferior’ human types. Engaging with Kant, Burke, the German Romantics, Nietzsche, Derrida, Lyotard, Irigaray and Arendt, as well as with women writers and artists, Battersby traces the history of these exclusions, while finding resources within the history of western culture for thinking human differences afresh The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference is essential reading for students of continental philosophy, gender studies, aesthetics, literary theory, visual culture, and race and social theory.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134753799
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 235
Book Description
Christine Battersby is a leading thinker in the field of philosophy, gender studies and visual and literary aesthetics. In this important new work, she undertakes an exploration of the nature of the sublime, one of the most important topics in contemporary debates about modernity, politics and art. Through a compelling examination of terror, transcendence and the ‘other’ in key European philosophers and writers, Battersby articulates a radical ‘female sublime’. A central feature of The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference is its engagement with recent debates around ‘9/11’, race and Islam. Battersby shows how, since the eighteenth century, the pleasures of the sublime have been described in terms of the transcendence of terror. Linked to the ‘feminine’, the sublime was closed off to flesh-and-blood women, to ‘Orientals’ and to other supposedly ‘inferior’ human types. Engaging with Kant, Burke, the German Romantics, Nietzsche, Derrida, Lyotard, Irigaray and Arendt, as well as with women writers and artists, Battersby traces the history of these exclusions, while finding resources within the history of western culture for thinking human differences afresh The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference is essential reading for students of continental philosophy, gender studies, aesthetics, literary theory, visual culture, and race and social theory.
On Spiders, Cyborgs, and Being Scared
Author: Joanna Zylinska
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719058233
Category : Feminist theory
Languages : en
Pages : 200
Book Description
This book deals with the institutional framework in post-socialist, after-empire spaces. It consists of nine case studies and two contributions of a more theoretical nature. Each of these analytical narratives sheds some light on the micro-politics of organised violence. After 1990, Serbs and Croats were competing over access to the resources needed for institution building and state building. Fear in turn triggered ethnic mobilisation. An 'unprofessional' riot of Serbs in the Krajina region developed into a professional war between Serbs and Croats in Croatia, in which several thousand died and several hundred thousand people were forcefully expelled from their homes. The Herceg-Bosnian style of resistance can be surprisingly effective. It is known that most of the heroin transported along the Balkans route passes through the hands of Albanian mafia groups; that this traffic has taken off since summer 1999. The concept of Staatnation is based on the doctrine according to which each 'nation' must have its own territorial State and each State must consist of one 'nation' only. The slow decline and eventual collapse of the Soviet and the Yugoslav empires was partly triggered, partly accompanied by the quest for national sovereignty. Dagestan is notable for its ethnic diversity and, even by post-Soviet standards, its dramatic economic deprivation. The integrative potential of cooperative movements at the republican, the regional and the inter-state level for the Caucasus is analyzed. The book also offers insights into the economics of ending violence. Finally, it addresses the question of reconciliation after ethnic cleansing.
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719058233
Category : Feminist theory
Languages : en
Pages : 200
Book Description
This book deals with the institutional framework in post-socialist, after-empire spaces. It consists of nine case studies and two contributions of a more theoretical nature. Each of these analytical narratives sheds some light on the micro-politics of organised violence. After 1990, Serbs and Croats were competing over access to the resources needed for institution building and state building. Fear in turn triggered ethnic mobilisation. An 'unprofessional' riot of Serbs in the Krajina region developed into a professional war between Serbs and Croats in Croatia, in which several thousand died and several hundred thousand people were forcefully expelled from their homes. The Herceg-Bosnian style of resistance can be surprisingly effective. It is known that most of the heroin transported along the Balkans route passes through the hands of Albanian mafia groups; that this traffic has taken off since summer 1999. The concept of Staatnation is based on the doctrine according to which each 'nation' must have its own territorial State and each State must consist of one 'nation' only. The slow decline and eventual collapse of the Soviet and the Yugoslav empires was partly triggered, partly accompanied by the quest for national sovereignty. Dagestan is notable for its ethnic diversity and, even by post-Soviet standards, its dramatic economic deprivation. The integrative potential of cooperative movements at the republican, the regional and the inter-state level for the Caucasus is analyzed. The book also offers insights into the economics of ending violence. Finally, it addresses the question of reconciliation after ethnic cleansing.
The Female Sublime from Milton to Swinburne
Author: Catherine Maxwell
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719057526
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 292
Book Description
This innovative study of vision, gender and poetry traces Milton's mark on Shelley, Tennyson, Browning and Swinburne to show how the lyric male poet achieves vision at the cost of symbolic blindness and feminisation. Drawing together a wide range of concerns including the use of myth, the gender of the sublime, the lyric fragment, and the relation of pain to creativity, this book is a major re-evaluation of the male poet and the making of the English poetic tradition.The female sublime from Milton to Swinburne examines the feminisation of the post-Miltonic male poet, not through cultural history, but through a series of mythic or classical figures which include Philomela, Orpheus and Sappho. It recovers a disfiguring sublime imagined as an aggressive female force which feminises the male poet in an act that simultaneously deprives and energises him. This book will be required reading for anyone with a serious interest in the English poetic tradition and Victorian poetry.
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719057526
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 292
Book Description
This innovative study of vision, gender and poetry traces Milton's mark on Shelley, Tennyson, Browning and Swinburne to show how the lyric male poet achieves vision at the cost of symbolic blindness and feminisation. Drawing together a wide range of concerns including the use of myth, the gender of the sublime, the lyric fragment, and the relation of pain to creativity, this book is a major re-evaluation of the male poet and the making of the English poetic tradition.The female sublime from Milton to Swinburne examines the feminisation of the post-Miltonic male poet, not through cultural history, but through a series of mythic or classical figures which include Philomela, Orpheus and Sappho. It recovers a disfiguring sublime imagined as an aggressive female force which feminises the male poet in an act that simultaneously deprives and energises him. This book will be required reading for anyone with a serious interest in the English poetic tradition and Victorian poetry.
Fragments of the Feminine Sublime in Friedrich Schlegel and James Joyce
Author: Ginette Verstraete
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438422911
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 296
Book Description
This is the first book to extensively study Joyce's work in the context of Germanic Romantic literary theory. It illustrates how Joyce's modern and postmodern innovation of the novel finds its theoretical roots in Friedrich Schlegel's conception of the Romantic, fragmentary novel. Verstraete discusses the relevance of Schlegel's early Romanticism to the young Joyce's essays on symbolic-realistic drama and argues that what has traditionally been described as Joyce's personal appropriation of Hegel's dialectics can better be understood in terms of Schlegel's ironic approach to philosophy. She relates Schlegel's concepts of irony and of the fragment to his feminist critique of nineteenth-century bourgeois art, and of Kant's categories of the beautiful and the sublime. She argues that Schlegel's ironization of the sublime yields a rhetorical subversion of the opposition between male artist and female model, art and reality, as well as between the sublime and the beautiful. Verstraete illustrates this critical and political force of what she calls the "feminine sublime" at work in Schlegel's essays on Greek comedy and in his novel Lucinde. The book demonstrates how the Romantic (feminine) sublime, as the site where autonomous art generates its own critique, offers us the tools with which to interpret Joyce's postmodern innovations of Romantic art.
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438422911
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 296
Book Description
This is the first book to extensively study Joyce's work in the context of Germanic Romantic literary theory. It illustrates how Joyce's modern and postmodern innovation of the novel finds its theoretical roots in Friedrich Schlegel's conception of the Romantic, fragmentary novel. Verstraete discusses the relevance of Schlegel's early Romanticism to the young Joyce's essays on symbolic-realistic drama and argues that what has traditionally been described as Joyce's personal appropriation of Hegel's dialectics can better be understood in terms of Schlegel's ironic approach to philosophy. She relates Schlegel's concepts of irony and of the fragment to his feminist critique of nineteenth-century bourgeois art, and of Kant's categories of the beautiful and the sublime. She argues that Schlegel's ironization of the sublime yields a rhetorical subversion of the opposition between male artist and female model, art and reality, as well as between the sublime and the beautiful. Verstraete illustrates this critical and political force of what she calls the "feminine sublime" at work in Schlegel's essays on Greek comedy and in his novel Lucinde. The book demonstrates how the Romantic (feminine) sublime, as the site where autonomous art generates its own critique, offers us the tools with which to interpret Joyce's postmodern innovations of Romantic art.
Romanticism and the Androgynous Sublime
Author: Warren Stevenson
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN: 9780838636688
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 166
Book Description
This book studies and articulates the emergence from the poetical subtext of six major English romantics of "the androgynous sublime", a mode that conflates the motif of psychic androgyny (traceable as far back as the Book of Genesis and Plato's Symposium) with the mode of sublimity, first discussed by Longinus and much debated from the eighteenth century onward. Frequently echoed by the romantic poets, Milton's description of the Holy Spirit's role in the creation of the world is androgynous. Since humane creativity mirrors divine creativity, it follows that the artist qua artist muct also be androgynous - that is, endowed with what Lyrical Ballads, calls "a more comprehensive soul" than is "supposed to be common among mankind". Characterized by a flexuous, limber style and an association with androgynous subject matter, the androgynous sublime subverts conventional notions of sublimity while offering a more comprehensive model with which to supplement, of non supplant, them. The methodology of this study is to present a "counter-deconstructive" reading of the text and, where applicable, designs of Blake, as well as the poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, seen from this somewhat novel but not ignoble perspective.
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN: 9780838636688
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 166
Book Description
This book studies and articulates the emergence from the poetical subtext of six major English romantics of "the androgynous sublime", a mode that conflates the motif of psychic androgyny (traceable as far back as the Book of Genesis and Plato's Symposium) with the mode of sublimity, first discussed by Longinus and much debated from the eighteenth century onward. Frequently echoed by the romantic poets, Milton's description of the Holy Spirit's role in the creation of the world is androgynous. Since humane creativity mirrors divine creativity, it follows that the artist qua artist muct also be androgynous - that is, endowed with what Lyrical Ballads, calls "a more comprehensive soul" than is "supposed to be common among mankind". Characterized by a flexuous, limber style and an association with androgynous subject matter, the androgynous sublime subverts conventional notions of sublimity while offering a more comprehensive model with which to supplement, of non supplant, them. The methodology of this study is to present a "counter-deconstructive" reading of the text and, where applicable, designs of Blake, as well as the poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, seen from this somewhat novel but not ignoble perspective.
Women's Liberation and the Sublime
Author: Bonnie Mann
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195187466
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 217
Book Description
Womens Liberation and the Sublime is a passionate report on the state of feminist thinking and practice after the linguistic turn. A critical assessment of masculinist notions of the sublime in modern and postmodern accounts grounds the author's positive and constructive recuperation of sublime experience in a feminist voice.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195187466
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 217
Book Description
Womens Liberation and the Sublime is a passionate report on the state of feminist thinking and practice after the linguistic turn. A critical assessment of masculinist notions of the sublime in modern and postmodern accounts grounds the author's positive and constructive recuperation of sublime experience in a feminist voice.
Sovereign Feminine
Author: Matthew Head
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520954769
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 351
Book Description
In the German states in the late eighteenth century, women flourished as musical performers and composers, their achievements measuring the progress of culture and society from barbarism to civilization. Female excellence, and related feminocentric values, were celebrated by forward-looking critics who argued for music as a fine art, a component of modern, polite, and commercial culture, rather than a symbol of institutional power. In the eyes of such critics, femininity—a newly emerging and primarily bourgeois ideal—linked women and music under the valorized signs of refinement, sensibility, virtue, patriotism, luxury, and, above all, beauty. This moment in musical history was eclipsed in the first decades of the nineteenth century, and ultimately erased from the music-historical record, by now familiar developments: the formation of musical canons, a musical history based on technical progress, the idea of masterworks, authorial autonomy, the musical sublime, and aggressively essentializing ideas about the relationship between sex, gender and art. In Sovereign Feminine, Matthew Head restores this earlier musical history and explores the role that women played in the development of classical music.
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520954769
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 351
Book Description
In the German states in the late eighteenth century, women flourished as musical performers and composers, their achievements measuring the progress of culture and society from barbarism to civilization. Female excellence, and related feminocentric values, were celebrated by forward-looking critics who argued for music as a fine art, a component of modern, polite, and commercial culture, rather than a symbol of institutional power. In the eyes of such critics, femininity—a newly emerging and primarily bourgeois ideal—linked women and music under the valorized signs of refinement, sensibility, virtue, patriotism, luxury, and, above all, beauty. This moment in musical history was eclipsed in the first decades of the nineteenth century, and ultimately erased from the music-historical record, by now familiar developments: the formation of musical canons, a musical history based on technical progress, the idea of masterworks, authorial autonomy, the musical sublime, and aggressively essentializing ideas about the relationship between sex, gender and art. In Sovereign Feminine, Matthew Head restores this earlier musical history and explores the role that women played in the development of classical music.
The Sublime in Everyday Life
Author: Anastasios Gaitanidis
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000317552
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 197
Book Description
Notions of the sublime are most often associated with the extraordinary, and include the intra-psychic, high-cultural and exceptional occurrences of elation and exaltation as part of the experience. Using psychoanalytic and aesthetic theories, this book aims to revitalise the sublime by re-evaluating its significance for contemporary life and, in a unique and fascinating endeavour, opens up a space that explores the sublime in the ordinary, everyday and quotidian. Through the exploration of familiar (i.e. love, death, art and nature) and unfamiliar (pornography, education and politics) threads of the sublime experience, this book posits the sublime as invoking an ordinary human response which contains minute, inter-psychic, inclusive and even mass-media cultural elements, and carries within it therapeutic and political potential. It explores loving and caring, as well as hateful, traumatic and destructive encounters with the sublime, demonstrating how it can overflow and destabilise our psychological and social symbolic structures and expose their fictional and constructed nature, but also shows it as something we can engage with in order to re-create and heal ourselves, above and beyond what any 'given' form of reality can offer us. Demonstrating the urgent need to understand the sublime as something that is immanent in our everyday life, a source of energy and inspiration that can be invoked to support our mental health and well-being, this book will be of great interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and art therapists, as well as scholars and students of philosophy and popular culture.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000317552
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 197
Book Description
Notions of the sublime are most often associated with the extraordinary, and include the intra-psychic, high-cultural and exceptional occurrences of elation and exaltation as part of the experience. Using psychoanalytic and aesthetic theories, this book aims to revitalise the sublime by re-evaluating its significance for contemporary life and, in a unique and fascinating endeavour, opens up a space that explores the sublime in the ordinary, everyday and quotidian. Through the exploration of familiar (i.e. love, death, art and nature) and unfamiliar (pornography, education and politics) threads of the sublime experience, this book posits the sublime as invoking an ordinary human response which contains minute, inter-psychic, inclusive and even mass-media cultural elements, and carries within it therapeutic and political potential. It explores loving and caring, as well as hateful, traumatic and destructive encounters with the sublime, demonstrating how it can overflow and destabilise our psychological and social symbolic structures and expose their fictional and constructed nature, but also shows it as something we can engage with in order to re-create and heal ourselves, above and beyond what any 'given' form of reality can offer us. Demonstrating the urgent need to understand the sublime as something that is immanent in our everyday life, a source of energy and inspiration that can be invoked to support our mental health and well-being, this book will be of great interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and art therapists, as well as scholars and students of philosophy and popular culture.