Abstract
This chapter pairs Benjamin Rush’s notion of “revolutiana,” enthusiasm for battle, with Burke’s theories of the sublime. War can also result in trauma, what Thomas Weiskel terms the negative sublime. The chapter first examines the importance of distance in Thomas DeQuincey’s “On War” and “The English Stage-Coach” to set the stage for Byron’s Siege of Corinth, which capitalizes on the distance of Muslim culture. George Gleig’s Subaltern also features sublime moments, mostly looking from afar at the events of the battlefield; this feeling will be replicated in Robert Ker Porter’s incredibly successful panorama, Conquest at Seringapatam. Spectatorship is also crucial to Joanna Baillie’s Count Basil, featuring a character whose obsession with conquest begins in the military and ends with a woman.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Bibliography
Ashfield, Andrew, and Peter De Bolla, eds. The Sublime: A Reader in Eighteenth Century Aesthetic Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Baillie, Joanna. Plays on the Passions. Edited by Peter Duthie. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2001.
Baillie, Matthew. Lectures and Observations on Medicine. London, 1825.
Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2013.
———. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford University Press, 1993.
Burrows, George Man. Commentaries on the Causes, Forms, Symptoms, and Treatment, Moral and Medical, of Insanity. London, 1828.
Byron, George Gordon. Don Juan. Edited by T. G. Steffan, E. Steffan, and W. W. Pratt. London: Penguin, 2004.
Colley, Linda. Britons. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1992.
Fulford, Tim. Romanticism and Masculinity: Gender, Politics, and Poetics in the Writings of Burke, Coleridge, Cobbett, Wordsworth, De Quincey, and Hazlitt. London: MacMillan, 1999.
Galperin, William H. The Return of the Visible in British Romanticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.
Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979.
Hatab, Lawrence J. “Human-Animality in Nietzsche.” In A Nietzschean Bestiary: Becoming Animal Beyond Docile and Brutal, edited by Christa Davis Acampora and Ralph R. Acampora, 211–219. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004.
Hegel, Georg. Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts. Leiden: A.H. Adriani, 1902. Google Books.
Judson, Barbara. “‘Sympathetic Curiosity’: The Theater of Joanna Baillie.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 25, no. 1 (2006): 49–70.
Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000.
Richardson, Alan. “A Neural Theatre: Joanna Baillie’s Plays on the Passions.” In Joanna Baillie, Romantic Dramatist, Critical Essays, edited by Thomas C. Crochunis, 136. London and New York: Routledge, 2004.
Ryan, Vanessa L. “The Physiological Sublime: Burke’s Critique of Reason.” Journal of the History of Ideas 62, no. 2 (April 2001): 265–279.
Shaw, Philip. The Sublime (The New Critical Idiom). Taylor and Francis, 2007. Kindle Edition.
Wurth, Kiene Brillenburg. Musically Sublime. New York: Fordham University Press, 2009.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Béres Rogers, K. (2019). Revolutiana and the Sublime in George Gleig’s Subaltern, Lord Byron’s Siege of Corinth, and Joanna Baillie’s Count Basil. In: Creating Romantic Obsession. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13988-9_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13988-9_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-13987-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-13988-9
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)