As interest in aesthetic experience evolved in the eighteenth century, discussions of the sublime located two opposed accounts of its place and use. Ferguson traces these two positions - the Burkean empiricist account and the Kantian formalist one - to argue that they had significance of aesthetics, including recent deconstructive and New Historicist criticism.
Chapter 1 An Introduction to the Sublime; Chapter 2 The Sublime of Edmund Burke, or The Bathos of Experience; Chapter 3 Burke to Kant: A Judgment Outside Comparison; Chapter 4 The Gothicism of the Gothic Novel; Chapter 5 Malthus, Godwin, Wordsworth, and the Spirit of Solitude; Chapter 6 In Search of the Natural Sublime: The Face on the Forest Floor; Chapter 7 Historicism, Deconstruction, and Wordsworth; Index;
