ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on the chemical sublime. It demonstrates that under the influence of the writings of British Romantics like Humphry Davy and Thomas De Quincey during the nineteenth century the use of ether, nitrous oxide, hashish, opium, and other substances was frequently articulated through the encounter with the sublime. The book also focuses on the gendering of the categories of the sublime and the beautiful in Burke and Kant in order to ask, in the context of Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe's rethinking of the masculine sublime as androgynous, whether the contemporary sublime is differently gendered as a result of shifting ideas of "masculine" and "feminine". The environmental sublime is distinguished from the natural sublime by the pedagogical rhetoric in which discussions of it are usually couched and the defensive stance from which the very notion of an "environmental sublime" is posited.
