Current understandings of the sublime are focused by a single word ('sublimity') and by a single author ('Longinus'). The sublime is not a word: it is a concept and an experience, or rather a whole range of ideas, meanings and experiences that are embedded in conceptual and experiential patterns. Once we train our sights on these patterns a radically different prospect on the sublime in antiquity comes to light, one that touches everything from its range of expressions to its dates of emergence, evolution, role in the cultures of antiquity as a whole, and later reception. This book is the first to outline an alternative account of the sublime in Greek and Roman poetry, philosophy, and the sciences, in addition to rhetoric and literary criticism. It offers new readings of Longinus without privileging him, but instead situates him within a much larger context of reflection on the sublime in antiquity.
Author(s): James I. Porter
Edition: Hardcover
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Year: 2016
Language: English
Pages: 714
Contents......Page 5
Illustrations......Page 8
Acknowledgements......Page 10
Abbreviations......Page 12
Note on translations......Page 14
Preface......Page 15
Introduction: the sublime before and after Longinus......Page 21
The art and rhetoric of the Longinian sublime......Page 77
The sublime before Longinus in rhetoric and criticism: Caecilius to Demetrius......Page 198
The sublime before Longinus in rhetoric and literature: Theophrastus to Homer......Page 303
The material sublime......Page 402
The immaterial sublime......Page 557
Conclusion......Page 638
Bibliography......Page 643
Index locorum......Page 678
General index......Page 700
