著者

菅田 浩一

出版者

関西学院大学

雑誌

英米文学 (ISSN:04246853)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.50, no.2, pp.43-56, 2006-03-05

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The Gothic novel is a literary genre which depicts taboos such as death, sexuality, violence and so on, stimulating a reader's five senses by aesthetic expressions of the sublime and the grotesque. I would like to discuss the notion of the sublime in this paper. There are five notions of the sublime. These are: the rhetorical sublime, the natural sublime, Burke's sublime, the Gothic sublime, and the sublime of terrorism. The notion of the sublime certainly had much to do with religious feelings until the beginning of the nineteenth century. There was a belief that the notion of the sublime would elevate humanity. However, its religious implications suffered a considerable shaking and depreciation in the Victorian Age and these implications have been more or less lost in the twenty-first century.