ABSTRACT
In Romanticism, the discourse of the sublime is developed as a response to the limitations of Burkean empiricism. Schelling's sense of the power of art to manifest the transcendental in sensuous form is echoed elsewhere in German romanticism. For one English Romantic writer, the poet, theologian, and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the influence of Immanuel Kant and the German Idealist tradition was to prove decisive. The neo-Kantian reading of the William Wordsworthian sublime rehearsed, in recent years, met with formidable challenges. The distinction that Edmund Burke and Kant established between the bracing austerity of the sublime and the languorous ostentation of the beautiful is arguably recuperated in the writings of male romanticism. If the sublime is to become a 'positive' experience, the mind must successfully discipline, not only nature and the Imagination, but also the female other. The notion that female writers of the Romantic period disavowed the darker aspects of the sublime must be qualified, however.
