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

TI IIZ NOTION OF TI IE "SUBLIME" 3 which cannot be interpreted in the homogenous medium of the history of aesthetics only. The independent discipline of aesthetics had not existed before the second half of the XVIIlth century, so meditation of this kind quite naturally came about in rhetorical, philosophical, political and other contexts. It is clearly pointed out in the introduction of a monograph by Samuel Holt Monk: "To reduce to any sort of order the extremely diverse and individualistic theories of sublimity that one finds in the eighteenth century is not easy."

s After outlining the nature of difficulty arising, however, he describes his impressive sketch of evolution: "I have therefore grouped the theories together loosely under very general headings in an effort to indicate that there is a progress, slow and continuous, but that this progress is one of organic growth. Ideas in individual treatises often advance it imperceptibly. The direction of this growth is toward the subjectivism of Kant. Based at first on the rhetorical treatise of Longinus as interpreted by Boileau, the sublime slowly develops at the hands of such writers as Dennis, Addison, Baillie, Hume, Burke, Kames, Reid, and Alison into a subjective or semisubjective concept."

9 Thus the pillars of development are the discovery of Longinos by Boileau in the second half of the XVI

Ith century, a treatise by Edmund Burke in the middle of the XVIIlth century and the critical theory by Kant towards the end of the century. These pillars are so much highlighted that the "story" of the sublime is often reduced to them, which can be observed in two French encyclopedias as well published in 1997.

1,

1 Further simplification is achieved by the fact that Kant is introduced through his interpretation of the notion of the sublime in Critique of Judgment, while his earlier work, the Observations on the Feeling of the beautiful and Sublime [Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen (Königsberg 1764)] substantially differs from his later work, as was pointed out by Paul Crowther." As far as the story of evolution written by Samuel Monk is concerned Peter de Bolla thinks "that mid-eighteenth-century accounts 8 Op. cit., 3. 9 Op. cit., 4. 1

0 Dictionnaire européenne des Lumiéres, publié sous la direction de Michel Delon, Paris, 1997, 1013-1016 (William Hauptman); Dictionnaire des Genres et notions littéraires

, ed. Alain Michel, Paris, 1997, 757-770 (Baldine Saint Girons). 1

1 The Kantian Sublime. From Morality to Art, Oxford, 1989, 8-15.