Exciting the Sublime: Terror, Interiority, and the Power of Shelley in The Cenci
abstract: The most horrific, darkest, and powerful forms of the sublime take place inside the enclosure of the human psyche; the interior of the mind is the playground for the sublime--not the crag and canyon filled natural world. For Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke, the driving force of the power of...
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ndltd-asu.edu-item-90302018-06-22T03:01:36Z Exciting the Sublime: Terror, Interiority, and the Power of Shelley in The Cenci abstract: The most horrific, darkest, and powerful forms of the sublime take place inside the enclosure of the human psyche; the interior of the mind is the playground for the sublime--not the crag and canyon filled natural world. For Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke, the driving force of the power of the sublime stems from the feelings of pain and fear: where is that more manifested than in the mind? Unlike the common, traditional, and overwhelmed discussion of Percy Shelley and his contemporaries and the power of the sublime in nature, I will argue that in The Cenci, Shelley, through well-chosen diction and precise composition of terrifying images, fashions characters and scenes in an emotion-driven play that elevates the mind of the reader to a transcendent sublime experience. Through a discussion of the theories of the aesthetic of the sublime laid out by Longinus, Burke, and Kant, I will provide a foundation for the later discussion of the rhetorical sublime evoked by Shelley in the ardent and horrifying play that is The Cenci. Looking at the conventional application of the theories of the sublime to romantic writing will make evident the holes in the discussion of the sublime and romantic writings that have almost forgotten the powerful and psychological rhetorical aspect of the sublime that is emphasized in the theoretical writings of both Burke and Kant. To clarify what is traditionally associated with Shelley and the sublime, a brief analysis of the Shelleyean sublime and Shelley's 1816 poem "Mont Blanc" will prepare the reader for an unconventional, but every bit important and powerful, function of the sublime in the 1819 play The Cenci based on the horrific happenings of a historical 16th century Italian noble family. Dissertation/Thesis Gowan, Kaitlin (Author) Lussier, Mark (Advisor) Corse, Douglas Taylor (Committee member) Broglio, Ronald (Committee member) Arizona State University (Publisher) Literature eng 73 pages M.A. English 2011 Masters Thesis http://hdl.handle.net/2286/R.I.9030 http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ All Rights Reserved 2011 |
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English |
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Dissertation |
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Literature |
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Literature Exciting the Sublime: Terror, Interiority, and the Power of Shelley in The Cenci |
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abstract: The most horrific, darkest, and powerful forms of the sublime take place inside the enclosure of the human psyche; the interior of the mind is the playground for the sublime--not the crag and canyon filled natural world. For Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke, the driving force of the power of the sublime stems from the feelings of pain and fear: where is that more manifested than in the mind? Unlike the common, traditional, and overwhelmed discussion of Percy Shelley and his contemporaries and the power of the sublime in nature, I will argue that in The Cenci, Shelley, through well-chosen diction and precise composition of terrifying images, fashions characters and scenes in an emotion-driven play that elevates the mind of the reader to a transcendent sublime experience. Through a discussion of the theories of the aesthetic of the sublime laid out by Longinus, Burke, and Kant, I will provide a foundation for the later discussion of the rhetorical sublime evoked by Shelley in the ardent and horrifying play that is The Cenci. Looking at the conventional application of the theories of the sublime to romantic writing will make evident the holes in the discussion of the sublime and romantic writings that have almost forgotten the powerful and psychological rhetorical aspect of the sublime that is emphasized in the theoretical writings of both Burke and Kant. To clarify what is traditionally associated with Shelley and the sublime, a brief analysis of the Shelleyean sublime and Shelley's 1816 poem "Mont Blanc" will prepare the reader for an unconventional, but every bit important and powerful, function of the sublime in the 1819 play The Cenci based on the horrific happenings of a historical 16th century Italian noble family. === Dissertation/Thesis === M.A. English 2011 |
author2 |
Gowan, Kaitlin (Author) |
author_facet |
Gowan, Kaitlin (Author) |
title |
Exciting the Sublime: Terror, Interiority, and the Power of Shelley in The Cenci |
title_short |
Exciting the Sublime: Terror, Interiority, and the Power of Shelley in The Cenci |
title_full |
Exciting the Sublime: Terror, Interiority, and the Power of Shelley in The Cenci |
title_fullStr |
Exciting the Sublime: Terror, Interiority, and the Power of Shelley in The Cenci |
title_full_unstemmed |
Exciting the Sublime: Terror, Interiority, and the Power of Shelley in The Cenci |
title_sort |
exciting the sublime: terror, interiority, and the power of shelley in the cenci |
publishDate |
2011 |
url |
http://hdl.handle.net/2286/R.I.9030 |
_version_ |
1718699300269064192 |