Resounding the Sublime

The sublime was a key category in aesthetic thought and practice in the long eighteenth century; but what did it sound like? By recovering the sounding variety of tones and noises of the discourse of the sublime, Miranda Stanyon reveals ‘how integral music was to forming and transforming the sublime [...] in rhetoric, philosophy, and literature’ (p. 2). She rejects a discursive prerogative of literature and philosophy over music, as is so often simply taken for granted, and instead conceptualizes their interplay in terms of relational media. This approach situates Resounding the Sublime in the centre of the ‘sonic turn’. The debates about music, sound and language that form the core of this book are anchored in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century epistemologies of sensual perceptions, which also turns this volume into a key reading for the history of emotions and the senses, as well as affect theory and intellectual and aesthetic exchange.

Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · German · Key (lock) · Linguistics · Literature · Reading (process) · Rhetoric · Sublime · Variety (cybernetics) · Historical Influence and Diplomacy · Musicology and Musical Analysis · Philosophy · Visual Culture and Art Theory