19 - The Romantic Sublime and Environmental Crisis

Summary

One of the major aesthetic and philosophical frameworks that has been used to represent and think about the modern environmental crisis is the sublime. This chapter traces how a tradition of the sublime traceable directly to Romantic literature and culture has been used to conceptualize both the forms of nature that we should cherish, such as particular landscapes, and the forms of nature that we should shrink from, such as extreme weather events. The chapter also addresses how in the twenty-first century the sublime, and specifically a ‘Romantic sublime’ based mainly on Kant’s writings, has been condemned as an aesthetic that assumes a distance between human and nonhuman, and which creates a false impression that humans can transcend or solve the environmental crisis. Finally, the chapter considers whether a Romantic eco-sublime might still have a useful role in helping us to think about the nonhuman world and our relationship with it in a time of crisis.