On the sublime guest editors: Éva Antal and Zoltán Cora
On the sublime guest editors: Éva Antal and Zoltán Cora

Summary/Abstract: The encounter with sublimity, whether sensual or verbal, has been accompanied by the experience of strong emotions ever since the term appeared in critical discourse. The rhetoric of the sublime was first examined in the classical handbook of Longinus, Peri Hupsous (“On the Sublime”), while during the time of its re-discovery, in the long eighteenth century, different interpretations attempted to characterize and analyze its features. “The great,” “the highest,” “the majestic”—these are only a few of the synonyms one can come across in the theoretical works of John Dennis, Joseph Addison, and, later, for instance, William Wordsworth (Hipple 16-17).1 In addition to works of literary criticism, numerous texts have discussed the philosophical, moral, and aesthetic implications of the term, from Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry, through Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment to twentieth-century modern and postmodern approaches (cf. Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jacques Derrida). The common denominator in all these discussions is that the tension between the knowable, familiar world and the constant pressure of the unknown, the incomprehensible and uncontrollable, remains a significant attribute of the sublime experience, while the loss of a meaningful relation between words and the intensity of the individual experience of reality permeates the aesthetics of the sublime from romantic to postmodern art.

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