Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 3. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 29)
Attila Debreceni: The Notion of the "Sublime" in Contemporary English, French and Hungarian Literary Criticism
THE NOTION OF THE "SUBLIME" 9 on the theme being described, and there has not even been an essay written on it. On the other hand several papers have been published in the English and French literature recently, not to speak of works each focussing on one writer (e.g. Angela Leighton's Shelley or Theresa M. Kelley', David B. Pine' and Richard G. Swartz' Wordsworth 3 8). The approaches are rather varied in terms of basic issues as well. What can be learnt from this account? How can the notion of the sublime be applied when analysing the Hungarian literary approaches of XVII Ith century? 5 Conclusions a. The notion of the sublime is not a unified concept and it cannot be understood by depicting an autonomous history of evolution. Its elements are embedded in discourses of different kinds, which means from another aspect that the discourse of the sublime unites in itself all the elements of the various discourses. b. Its variants can be distinguished on the basis of various aspects of equal ranks which are in an interactive relationship with each other too. In terms of time (e.g. Boileau, Burke, Kant); as national variants (French, English, Irish, Scottish, German and Italian); thematically (natural, religious, literary, fine art); as variants of an epoch (attitudes of Burke, Gerard, Blair, Diderot and Winckelmann were formed in the 1750s, 1760s). c. Emotionalist and neoclassicist interpretations of the sublime can be very closely related to each other. The introduction of the notion of grace is very promising in the case of the latter. d. The sublime, as an aesthetic category and stylistic approach can be interpreted even when compared to rhetoric attitude, which was especially significant under still unformed conditions of Hungarian literary criticism at the end of the XVIIIth century. 3 8 Angela Leighton, Shelley and the Sublime , Cambridge University Press, 1984; Theresa M. Kelley, Wordsworth's Re visionär)* Aesthetics, Cambridge University Press, 1988; David B. Pirie, William Wordsworth: The Poetry of Grandeur and of Tenderness, London and New York, 1982; Richard G. Swartz, Wordsworth and the Political Sublime , San Diego, 1986.
