The Irish writer and political philosopher Edmund Burke is these days best known as the author of Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) [578K], a landmark conservative defense of tradition, monarchy, and authority. But it's an earlier work that earns him a place in the Gothic tradition. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, particularly its discussion of sublimity, is a founding document of Gothic aesthetics which had a huge impact on the "classical" Gothic and on all the genres which developed from it. The Enquiry (and the extensive aesthetic debate it engendered) helped provide a vocabulary — psychological as well as aesthetic and rhetorical — for writers interested in extending the late eighteenth-century's burgeoning interest in emotion and human psychology. By foregrounding the role and power of aesthetic concepts — and their psychological mechanisms and impact — such as the sublime and the picturesque, Burke's work influenced, directly or indirectly, writers such as Charlotte Smith and Ann Radcliffe, whose influence on the Gothic was immense. A full comprehension of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Gothicism requires some understanding of Burke's important essay and its influence.
Burke deathmask
Laurence Hutton Collection of Life and Death Masks
Princeton U Library
Laurence Hutton Collection of Life and Death Masks
Princeton U Library
