First published in 1757, Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful was a treatise on aesthetics that had a tangible impact on the Romantic and Gothic movements. Burke, through this work, was the first to offer a complete philosophical exposition that proposed the separation of the beautiful and the sublime into their own individual categories.
Throughout the book, Burke discusses the attraction of the grotesque, the terrible and the uncontrollable. He suggests that beauty stimulates love, and that the sublime evokes horror. While beauty brings calmness, the sublime attracts tension and uncertainty. The feeling that something is sublime, he proposes, is triggered by extremes –vastness, extreme height, difficulty, darkness or excessive light.
This book presents a rigorous analysis of the relationship between emotion, beauty, and art form- one that is recognized as not only a landmark work of aesthetic theory, but also as one of the first prominent works in European literature on the Sublime, a subject that has enthralled thinkers from Kant to Diderot to the philosophers and critics of today.
Burke's writing provided an intelligent rationale for why grotesque or extravagant architecture, Gothic novels, and vast wilderness were so attractive.
