Cover; Title; Copyright; Dedication; Contents; Series editor's preface; Acknowledgements; Introduction; What is the Sublime?; The Sublime Has a History; The Sublime is Now; Note on Texts and Approaches; 1 Before (and After) Longinus; Ecstasy and Instruction; Rhetoric and Nobility; God, Nature, and the Sublime; Rhetoric and Revelation; Gender and Excess; Sublime Conflict; Conclusions; 2 Early Modern Sublimity; Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare: Sublime Authorities; Milton: The Republican Sublime; Burnet and Dennis: Nature and Religion; Addison: On Description; Shaftesbury: Embracing the Ideal

Akenside: Descanting the SublimeBaillie: Doing Things With Words; Conclusions; 3 Burke: A Philosophical Enquiry; Words, Things, and Feelings; Pleasure and Pain; Engendering the Sublime and the Beautiful; Reflections on the Revolution in France; Conclusions; 4 Kant: The 'Analytic of the Sublime'; The Critiques of Pure and Practical Reason; The Critique of Aesthetic Judgement; The 'Analytic of the Sublime'; The Ethics of the Sublime; The Politics of the Sublime; The Art of the Sublime; Conclusions; 5 The Romantic Sublime; German Idealism; Coleridge After Kant; Wordsworth: Staging the Sublime

Feminine DifferenceConclusions; 6 Beyond Romanticism; Late Sublimity; Schopenhauer and Eliot: Voiding the Subject; Marx and Gissing: Capitalising the Sublime; Nietzsche and Lawrence: Sublime Malice; Freud and Woolf: Moments of Being; Conclusions; 7 The Sublime is Now: Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard; Return to Kant; Derrida: The Truth in Painting; Deleuze: Exceeding Kant; Newman and Lyotard: The Postmodern Sublime; 'The Sign of History'; The Return of Terror; Conclusions; 8 From the Sublime to the Ridiculous: Lacan and Žižek; Lacan: Sublimity and Sublimation; Žižek: The Sublime Object of Ideology

The Art of the Ridiculous SublimeTowards the Fragile Absolute; Conclusions; Afterword; Return to Beauty; Glossary; Bibliography; Index