Recommendations from our site
“I think he belongs on this list as he offers an original scientific—we might say physiological—investigation of the sublime and the beautiful, while at the same time holding on to an objectivist view somehow. So we get both the subjective side and the objective side in one theory. He gives us a list of qualities that are supposed to elicit the sublime. So: obscurity, darkness, towering heights, irregularity, being hidden and unknown, and so forth. Think of entering a cave, something like that. This idea was very influential on Gothic writers like Mary Shelley and Ann Radcliffe.” Read more...
Robert Clewis, Philosopher
“a work I absolutely love. There is a passage in which Burke explains why we admire the Greeks but love the Trojans and it is done beautifully. I can’t do justice to it. Anyway, in the book, there is an account of beauty in contrast to the sublime, linking it to weakness, to prettiness, to what is small. Burke says that women realize this, and they use it, pretending to weakness, to totter, to faint and what have you.” Read more...
The Best Mary Wollstonecraft Books
Sylvana Tomaselli, Historian
