Introduction

For most readers of eighteenth-century and romantic-period writing today, the sublime is effectively synonymous with dramatic natural phenomena, with mountains and oceans, storms and deserts, the so-called natural sublime. The natural sublime, in this context, is investigated primarily in philosophical treatments of aesthetics, and secondarily in creative arts. This anthology recovers a broader context for engagements with, and writing about, the sublime during the ‘long eighteenth century’, offering a selection of texts from a wide range of ostensibly unrelated areas of knowledge which both generate and investigate sublime effects. On the basis of this selection, we make two claims about the place of the sublime in the cultural history of the romantic period. First: that the ‘natural sublime’; was only one of a number of different species of sublimity present in British culture of the late eighteenth century and romantic period. Second: that these various popular constructions of the sublime played a more significant role in the cultural history of the romantic period than the substantial body of philosophical speculation about the nature and causes of sublime experience produced during the eighteenth century, what Peter de Bolla has called ‘the discourse on the sublime’.1