These revolutions in taste continue to have an enormous effect on the art and culture of the present day. It was through the notion of the sublime that the taste developed for the rugged rather than the harmonious or smooth, the forceful rather than the restrained or measured, the wild rather than the orderly or symmetrical, the primitive rather than the sophisticated: in short, for the Romantic and the Gothic rather than the Neoclassical. It was also a key term through which the radically new forms of taste for art and for the aesthetic appreciation of nature that were developing at the time found articulation: the term was used to elevate the taste for ruins, for the Alpine, for storms, deserts and oceans, the supernatural and the shocking. (It is very much as a legacy of this complex history that the word now has such a wide set of meanings.) Although today the term, in its more properly philosophical senses, has little currency outside academic discourses, during this time it was a word which was widely used in everyday speech and writing. Hardly a writer on these matters during this period had nothing to say about the idea, and quite what the term might mean was hotly contested. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a period which spans the rise and fall of both Neoclassicism and Romanticism, the 'sublime' was one of the central concepts around which discourses on art and aesthetic experience were articulated. These various - and perhaps in some senses contradictory - uses of the term stem from the complex and rich history of its development.
Above all, the sublime has come to refer to the 'rush' of intense aesthetic pleasure paradoxically stemming from the displeasure of fear, horror or pain. For others, the sublime is that which is unpresentable, ungraspable or unimaginable. For some, the sublime is that which is terrifyingly vast or powerful. More particularly, it is also used to refer to the awe-inpiring, the grandiose or great. It might be used to refer to the transcendent, the numinous, the uplifting or the ecstatic.
However, in particular in the realms of philosophy, literary studies, art history or cultural criticism, it has a range of more specific meanings. The word 'sublime' is used colloquially nowadays as a vague superlative. Fredric Jameson - globalisation and the sublime.Development of the sublime as a distinct category.Reception of Longinus in the C17th and C18th.
A brief history of the notion of the sublime
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