Literary Theory of Sublime: A Materialistic Critique

Abstract

The literary theory of sublime claims that man can transcend the human and the social world. The concept of transcendence in the sublime theory emanates from the lofty and elevated thought that disregards the socio- political thereby material existence of an individual. The exclusion of materiality--human and the social--along with the individual difference in the perception of sublimity constitutes the concept as elitist that is looked at from the excluded pole so as to unravel its embedded politics. Wordsworth inherits claim of the literary theory of the sublime that man can transcend the human and the social. Particularly, in the description of the sublime force the poet camouflages the poverty of the Wye valley and the disillusionment of the people after the French Revolution in the poemTintern Abbey.Exclusively, his sensibility marks the avoidance of the social--materiality--at the cost of valorization of the beauty and sublimity of the nature turning the poem as unhistorical. The unhistoricity of the poem is manifested in its landscape prospect or loco-description whereby socio-historical context is excluded. Therefore, the poet's use of the sublime is grounded in the socio-historical analytic of his poem in the form in a way which reveals the politics of exclusion, which we can call the anti-sublime.