ABSTRACT
Today of course we associate the sublime with thundering waterfalls, ocean waves crashing against forbidding cliffs or a spectacular sunset, with the adagietto from Gustav Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, or with any number of poems or paintings endorsed by Ruskin. We are therefore liable to forget that for Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, whose discussions of the sublime resonated with the educated British and German middle classes well into modern times, the sublime suggested not only visual or auditory violence, but actual physical brutality, terror, and pain. This was still the case in the 1930 Grosse Brockhaus definition of the sublime, which defined the sublime as ‘an object or process whose inner excellence abnormally heightens or threatens to shatter its material form of appearance. The force it exerts must be greater than normal’.1
