In Chapter 4 she continues the narrative with subsequent developments of the category of the sublime affected by Schiller, Schopenhauer and British Romanticism. In Part I, Brady aims to characterize the core meaning of the sublime by tracing its development from the rhetorical sublime of Longinus into a category largely of nature appreciation in the 18 th century with the aesthetic theories of Addison, Gerard, Burke, and Alison (in Britain) and Mendelssohn and Kant (in Germany). The book is divided into two roughly equal parts. While sublime responses today might not be as Romantic or theological as in previous centuries, Brady shows that there is, nonetheless, significant continuity to be found, ranging from the experience of vast and powerful landscapes had by European elites on the Grand Tour, to Romantic poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge and the American naturalists Thoreau and Muir, to nature appreciators today. In addition, Brady supports the claim that contemporary tastes in landscapes have not changed radically since the 18 th century by citing the work of several contemporary nature writers such as Páll Skúlason, who writes about the volcanic landscape of Askja in Iceland, and Lucy Lippard, who relates her experience of the Grand Canyon. Brady makes a good case that the neglect of the concept by Anglo-American aestheticians is unjustified: sublime responses, especially to natural environments, are still with us today, and may be even more frequent than in former times given that "Places that were once distant and inaccessible have become much closer through adventure tourism and the like." (p. In recent years the concept has been used, on the one hand, too liberally by postmodern philosophers who have stretched 'the sublime' beyond conceptual coherence, and, on the other hand, too little by Anglo-American philosophers who have largely forgotten this aesthetic category. This aim is important, and it is one with which I have great sympathy. In this book Emily Brady seeks to 'reassess' and 'reclaim' the concept of the sublime in order to show the continuing relevance of this aesthetic category for debates in contemporary aesthetics and environmental thought.
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