Longinus’s On the Sublime brought the concept of the sublime to the centre of the Neoclassical and the Romantic aesthetics from the 17th century onwards. His conception of the sublime inspired Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1756/57) and Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement (1790) in the 18th century. Burke and Kant both differentiated the sublime from the beautiful as an aesthetic category. Longinus’s non-differentiation between these categories is the motivation behind both the Neoclassical and the Romantic claim on his conception of the sublime. Relating the Longinian sublime to Burke and Kant’s dualistic approach to the beautiful and the sublime, this study argues that Burke’s reconsideration of the Longinian sublime in its empirical relation to the object and Kant’s reformulation of it as a transcendental quality of the mind have all progressively empowered the sublime’s dominion over the beautiful, symbolising the Romantic takeover against the Neoclassical.

Longinus’s On the Sublime brought the concept of the sublime to the centre of the Neoclassical and the Romantic aesthetics from the 17th century onwards. His conception of the sublime inspired Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1756/57) and Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement (1790) in the 18th century. Burke and Kant both differentiated the sublime from the beautiful as an aesthetic category. Longinus’s non-differentiation between these categories is the motivation behind both the Neoclassical and the Romantic claim on his conception of the sublime. Relating the Longinian sublime to Burke and Kant’s dualistic approach to the beautiful and the sublime, this study argues that Burke’s reconsideration of the Longinian sublime in its empirical relation to the object and Kant’s reformulation of it as a transcendental quality of the mind have all progressively empowered the sublime’s dominion over the beautiful, symbolising the Romantic takeover against the Neoclassical.