Abstract
In 1992, Frances Ferguson’s Solitude and the Sublime noted a strong association between the sublime and unpopulated nature in Romantic works. By focusing on socio-historical aspects in the Romantic poets’ representations of the sublime in nature, Ferguson’s interpretation along with New Historicist critiques of Romanticism restrict the scope of explorations of the sublime in Romantic writings. This thesis returns to Ferguson’s text in order to address the limitations of reading the sublime as a solitude inclined, socially averse aesthetic category and to provide an alternative perspective to the issue through the writings of Coleridge. The possibility of literary representations of the sublime as an experience that potentially reconfigures sociability is approached from three innovative genres adopted by Coleridge: the genres of gothic ballads, conversation poems, and the Biographia Literaria. In the gothic ballads and the conversation poems, sympathy plays a crucial role in Coleridge’s conceptualization of the sublime. A lack or breakdown of sympathy, which dissolves human sociability, also turns sublime feeling into unmitigated terror. Biographia Literaria turns away from relatively more volatile forms of interpersonal sympathy towards establishing institutions through new language and genres to further stabilize the social basis for the sublime. Coleridge’s writings, like Wordsworth, also includes nature, but to a limited extent. Nature, to Coleridge, only acts as a site that facilitates apprehension of the sublime that enable glimpses into the truth of life. Overall, this thesis attempts to expand the interpretations of Romantic representations of the sublime through Coleridge’s different genres and to offer the possibility for future studies to reconsider sympathy’s role as part of the sublime in reconfiguring sociability.