ABSTRACT
This chapter presents two aspects of the problematic one historical, the other aestheticin relation to Romantic-period national fiction and late-Enlightenment aesthetic theory, before going on to consider the nineteenth-century rise of a sublime modality of the novel premised upon the deformation, mutation or dissolution of the human. With its hypothesis of an impossible subject who speaks from outside biological generation, Frankenstein posed an extreme version of the case that would not be taken up again until the last decades of the century, after the high tide of Victorian realism. Notre-Dame de Paris, instantiating the new mode of fiction, confounds the figure of the human more drastically than any novel that would be written by a major Victorian author. Even Charles Dickens, English master of the sublime, seeks to rescue the human diminished, crippled or stunted, confined to a shrunken private sphere from the Hegelian abyss: beyond which British fiction will not pass for the remainder of the nineteenth century.
