ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. John Martin, who specialized in cataclysmic and apocalyptic images, employs this same intellectual structure throughout his career in his many representations of biblical history. Turner, of course, also painted similar embodiments of the religious sublime, such as The Fifth Plague of Eygpt and The Angel Standing in the Sun, but he more frequently drew his subjects of catastrophic sublimity from history, classical literature, or his own experience. Writing on The Impact of Pompeii on the Literary Imagination, Laurence Goldstein has observed that in the destruction of earlier optimism during the Age of Revolutions which followed Gibbon Pompeii played an important role, as a social phenomenon and as a metaphor. Much in the manner of Tennysons Mariana, Jane Eyre here expressionistically makes the objects described by a narrator here literally images communicate that narrator's inner world.
