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The History Of British Art And The Burkean Sublime, Natalie Ware

Young Historians Conference

A Philosophical Enquiry into the Beautiful and the Sublime by British philosopher Edmund Burke, published in 1757, proposed a concrete definition of the aesthetics concept of the sublime. This definition solidified the place of the sublime in the minds of British artists and philosophers from the Baroque period onward into the current contemporary art culture. The sublime has periodically been embraced, redefined, or even claimed as fatal to art itself. As British artists have struggled to grapple with the sublime throughout the centuries, the works that they’ve created out of this discourse have become emblems of the sublime controversy and …