Date of Publication: 2007-11-01

Divided into five sections, essays by Ben Faber, Katherine Quinsey, Melora G. Vandersluis, Richard J. Lane, Natasha Duquette, Susan R. Bauman, Krista Lysack, Sandra Hagan, Roxanne Harde, Cheri Larsen Hoeckley, Franceen Neufeld, and Monika Hilder address mutually interdependent connections between providence and grace, sublimity and ethics, gender and hymnody, literature and activism, and finally, aesthetics and hope.

Dr. Natasha Duquette is an assistant professor of English at Taylor University College where she teaches courses on eighteenth-century literature and Romanticism. Her research explores interfaces between poetics, aesthetics, and theology, with a focus on eighteenth and early nineteenth-century women writers. She is an active member of the Christianity and Literature Study Group of Canada and the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism.

"With topics ranging from Daniel Defoe to Jacques Derrida, this book shows the reach and the long-standing importance of the aesthetics of the sublime. Natasha Duquette has assembled a plurality of voices in a fascinating mix of essays that provide a chronological study of the shifting representations of the sublime in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature. The religious and the Biblical sublime are well represented, in addition to secular manifestations of the sublime, even, as one author describes, in a movement from the “aspiration of the Gothic spire to the madness of subterranean dungeons.” These scrupulously researched and well-written essays include analysis of Alexander Pope’s brilliant satires and Anne Brontë’s tenacious hymns, a rich range of material that will appeal to a wide audience."

Deborah Kennedy, Saint Mary’s University

author of Helen Maria Williams and the Age of Revolution

Sample pdf (including Table of Contents)