The Politics of Subreption: Resisting the Sublime in Shelley's "Mont Blanc"

While "Mont Blanc" is traditionally read as engaging the alpine sublime in order to pose fundamental ontological and epistemological questionsthus construing the sublime moment as the origin of questions about "the nature of mind, the nature of knowledge, the nature of reality, and th...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Studies in romanticism 2013-07, Vol.52 (2), p.225-252
Main Author: BORUSHKO, MATTHEW C.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Aesthetic judgment
Beauty
British & Irish literature
Creativity
English literature
Fear
Literary criticism
Nonviolence
Poetry
Political violence
Politics
Ravines
Sexual violence
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft (1797-1851)
Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)
Sublimity
Violence
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Summary:While "Mont Blanc" is traditionally read as engaging the alpine sublime in order to pose fundamental ontological and epistemological questionsthus construing the sublime moment as the origin of questions about "the nature of mind, the nature of knowledge, the nature of reality, and the relation of the human mind to the universe"1-a closer examination of the poem's politics, both implicit and explicit, reveals the sublime to be double-edged: creative of a precarious subjective "vacancy" that can incite philosophical and critical reflection but that can also, through its constitutive violence, foreclose upon those reflective capacities.
ISSN:0039-3762
2330-118X
2330-118X
DOI:10.1353/srm.2013.0016