The Sublime Tragedy of the Lost Cause by A. St. J Pickett, first published in 1884, is a rare manuscript, the original residing in one of the great libraries of the world. This book is a reproduction of that original, which has been scanned and cleaned by state-of-the-art publishing tools for better readability and enhanced appreciation. Restoration Editors' mission is to bring long out of print manuscripts back to life. Some smudges, annotations or unclear text may still exist, due to permanent damage to the original work. We believe the literary significance of the text justifies offering this reproduction, allowing a new generation to appreciate it.

Professor Boitani's latest book explores the areas of the tragic and the sublime in medieval literature. Boitani studies tragic and sublime tensions in stories and scenes recounted by such major poets as Dante, Chaucer and Petrarch, as well as themes shared by writers and philosophers and traditional poetic images.

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This study is concerned with the different interpretations of Greek tragedy proposed by G.W.F. Hegel. While Hegel's philosophical interest in tragedy as an art form is well known, the motivation for his preoccupation with this art form needs to be further explored. Indeed, why would Hegel, a pivotal figure of German idealism, be inclined to concern himself with a form of poetry that reached its peak in the 5th century B.C.' Precisely this question forms the core of this book. It articulates what the primary stakes are and thereby develop and defend the thesis that Hegel's examination of Greece and tragedy is one that has a direct bearing on the "fate" of politics in the modern world.

This volume offers readers a unique and comprehensive overview of different theoretical and interdisciplinary perspectives on 'the sublime'.

The book is the first English translation of Nicolai Hartmann's final book, published in 1953. It will be of value to graduate students in philosophy, scholars concerned with 20th century Continental philosophy, students of aesthetics and art history and criticism, and persons in and out of academic philosophy who wish to develop their aesthetic understanding and responsiveness to art and music. Aesthetics, Hartmann believes, centers on the phenomenon of beauty, and art “objectivates” beauty, but beauty exists only for a prepared observer. Part One explores the act of aesthetic appreciation and its relation to the aesthetic object. It discovers phenomenologically determinable levels of apprehension. Beauty appears when an observer peers through the physical foreground of the work into the strata upon which form has been bestowed by an artist in the process of expressing some theme. The theory of the stratification of aesthetic objects is perhaps Hartmann's most original and fundamental contribution to aesthetics. He makes useful and perceptive distinctions between the levels in which beauty is given to perception by nature, in the performing and the plastic arts, and in literature of all kinds. Part Two develops the phenomenology of beauty in each of the fine arts. Then Hartmann explores some traditional categories of European aesthetics, most centrally those of unity of value and of truth in art. Part Three discusses the forms of aesthetic values. Hartmann contrasts aesthetic values with moral values, and this exploration culminates in an extensive phenomenological exhibition of three specific aesthetic values, the sublime, the charming, and the comic. A brief appendix, never completed by the author, contains some reflections upon the ontological implications of aesthetics. Engaged in constant dialogue with thinkers of the past, especially with Aristotle, Kant and Hegel, Hartmann corrects and develops their insights by reference to familiar phenomena of art, especially with Shakespeare, Rembrandt and Greek sculpture and architecture. In the course of his analysis, he considers truth in art (the true-to-life and the essential truth), the value of art, and the relation of art and morality. The work stands with other great 20th century contributors to art theory and philosophical aesthetics: Heidegger, Sartre, Croce, Adorno, Ingarden, and Benjamin, among others.

This book examines the relationship between nihilism and postmodernism in relation to the sublime, and is divided into three parts: history, theory, and praxis. Arguing against the simplistic division in literary criticism between nihilism and the sublime, the book demonstrates that both are clearly implicated with the Enlightenment. Postmodernism, as a product of the Enlightenment, is therefore implicitly related to both nihilism and the sublime, despite the fact that it is often characterised as either nihilistic or sublime. Whereas prior forms of nihilism are 'modernist' because they seek to codify reality, postmodernism creates a new formulation of nihilism - 'postmodern nihilism' - that is itself sublime. This is explored in relation to a broad survey of postmodern literature in two chapters, the first on aesthetics and the second on ethics. It offers a coherent thesis for reappraising the relationship between nihilism and the sublime, and grounds this argument with frequent references to postmodern literature, making it a book suitable for both researchers and those more generally interested in postmodern literature.

Returning to questions about ideology and subjectivity, Flisfeder argues that Slavoj Žižek's theory of film aims to re-politicize film studies and film theory, bringing cinema into the fold of twenty-first century politics.

This work examines four Latin American writers--Jorge Luis Borges, Juan Rulfo, Cesar Vallejo, and Ricardo Piglia--in the context of their respective national cultural traditions. The author proposes that a consideration of tragedy affords new ways of understanding the relation between literature and the modern Latin American nation-state. As an interpretive index, this tragic attunement sheds new light on both the foundational works of modern Latin American literature and the counter-foundational literary critiques of modernization and nation-building. Topics include Borges's short story "El Sur" in relation to the Argentine "civilization and barbarism" debate, Juan Rulfo's novella "Pedro Paramo in the context of post-revolutionary reflection on national identity in Mexico, and the lyric poetry of Cesar Vellajo's "Trilce. The reading is based on a juxtaposition of aporetically incompatible terms: mourning, the avant-garde, and Andean indigenism or messianism. The final section of the book investigates two novels by Ricardo Piglia, "Respiracion artificial and "La ciudad ausente, in the dual context of dictatorship and the market. Piglia's writing both echoes and marks a limit for tragedy as an interpretive paradigm.