Urban sublimes

Sangster, M. (2023) Urban sublimes. In: Duffy, C. (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to the Romantic Sublime. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, pp. 104-116. ISBN 9781316515914 (doi: 10.1017/9781009026963.011)

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Abstract

This chapter opens by considering the vexed relationship between Romantic poetic practices that were increasingly interested in the powers and perceptions of individuals and the Romantic period’s burgeoning metropolitan profusion. The first sections explore the ambivalent or outright negative attitudes towards cities and their populations expressed by poets such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey and considers how distancing perspectives are employed in writings by Walter Scott and Letitia Landon. The later parts of the essay consider alternative versions of the urban sublime, touching on topographical and statistical representations by Thomas Malton and Patrick Colquhoun; celebrations of multiplicity by Pierce Egan and William Hazlitt; readings against the grain by Charles Baudelaire, Thomas De Quincey and Charles Lamb; and considerations of ruination by John Martin, Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Mary Shelley.

Item Type:Book Sections
Status:Published
Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID:Sangster, Professor Matthew
Authors: Sangster, M.
College/School:College of Arts & Humanities > School of Critical Studies > English Literature
Publisher:Cambridge University Press
ISBN:9781316515914
Published Online:06 July 2023

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