The ascetic sublime

The Ascetic Sublime is an investigation of the use of disciplinary practices for the apparent transcendence of the human, or the sublime, in works of literature of the long eighteenth century, in Britain and America. In both cultures there was an attempt to sever the multi-stranded cord of connections between asceticism and the sublime, but the effort in part failed, though both concepts were modified by the effort. The first chapter explores a paradigmatic and highly influential case of the ascetic sublime: Plato. The emphasis in this chapter on the philosophical, aesthetic, and political consequences of Plato\u27s synthesis of religious ideas into his version of the ascetic sublime is paradigmatic for future chapters. Of the remaining four chapters, two are devoted to the American, and two to the British, struggle with the contradictions inherent in the ascetic sublime. Chapter two explores the vexed question in American Puritanism of preparing for what was thought to be freely given by God, namely a moment of grace. Emerson recreated Puritan preparationism by consistently advocating silence, seclusion, and self-denial as the means for attaining epiphanic consciousness. After losing faith in such consciousness with the death of his son, he ultimately returned to renunciation as a means for achieving transcendence, though now in the fight against slavery. Edmund Burke\u27s masochistic emphasis on pain, terror, and a sense of being inundated in the moment of sublimity relied upon a strict social and cosmic hierarchy, which he found in the concept of the great chain of being. Mary Wollstonecraft demonstrated that Burke\u27s hierarchy concealed the disorders of the politics of prescription. She defined the sublime as the passion an upright soul feels before its God and advocated radical self-denial for both the sublime and for the reclamation of a virtue she felt women had to achieve in their struggle against debauched male desire. Wordsworth also associated the sublime with pain, but he was interested in how suffering prepared one for a transcendent experience. Suffering became a surrogate for self-denial; both were depicted as preliminary to transcendent moments