The Spirit of the Sublime: Frankenstein and Poe’s Employment of Terror

The American and British romantic literary movements are juxtaposed by their unique approaches to the sentimental sublime, defined by an overpowering emotion that surpasses the limits of human imagination. While both spheres of the movement sought to explore the root of the sublime as a kind of perversion, they each found its origin in a different location. American writers such as Edgar Allen Poe used the sublime to translate their perceived internal perversion of humanity, while British authors like Mary Shelley transposed perversion as an external factor prevalent in the natural world. To analyze this, the corresponding works of Frankenstein and A Descent Into The Maelstrom are explored line by line to uncover the meaning of the sublime throughout the romantic literary movement