期刊名称：Cercles : Revue Pluridisciplinaire du Monde Anglophone
电子版ISSN：1292-8968
出版年度：2000
期号：1
页码：61-69
出版社：Université de Rouen
摘要：During the second half of the eighteenth century the meaning of the word"sublime" shifted radically from a rhetorical to an aesthetic, psychologicaland philosophical sense. The popularity of the Peri Hupsous, the Greek treatyby the pseudo-Longinus first translated in English in 1652, had establishedthe distinction between the elevated style and energy (art's capacity to raisepassion) as an aesthetic emotion. After Boileau emphasized "l'extraordinaireet le merveilleux" in the archetypal sublime effect of the divine "Fiat lux","sublime" became a common critical term. John Dennis, insisting on the vio-lent emotion caused by the sublime—especially with heightened spiritualfeelings—and Addison, reinforced the element of pathos in sublimity, whichculminated almost in empathy with John Baillie. Lockian sensationalism hadhelped theoreticians to focus interest on sublimity as a sensory experience, notas a quality present in the object. Locke's subjective psychology encouragedan aesthetic of mass and space: the feeling or thought produced by the con-templation of an object is proportional to the size of the object. The mind ofman, says Addison, experiences a feeling of baf.ement, a sense of awe andwonder at the view of a "vast, uncultivated desert, of huge heaps of moun-tains, high rocks and precipices, or a wide expanse of waters," because it"naturally hates everything that looks like a restraint upon it and is apt to fan-cy itself under a sort of confinement, when the sight is pent up in a narrowcompass" [Addison 412].
