WILL SLOCOMBE
University of Wales, Aberystwyth
Abstract
This article is a ‘test-case’ of a
larger argument explored in Slocombe’s Nihilism and the Sublime
Postmodern, using selected essays and poems by Percy Bysshe
Shelley. Its primary aim is to articulate the relationship
between the sublime and nihilism with reference to
early-nineteenth-century debates about atheism. Translation here
is a trope of understanding how these links manifest in
Shelley’s work, and signifies not technical, ‘literary’
translation, but a method of cultural assimilation and
transmission. Shelley’s ‘atheistic’ writings are used to
demonstrate a snapshot of these debates during that period, as
part of the larger international debates about religion and
scientific rationality, but are also shown to be an expression
of the links between nihilism and the sublime that have, in
today’s critical environment, been elided. This paper thus
demonstrates that nihilism and the sublime are in many senses
‘translations’ of each other, and that both emerge from the same
intellectual and cultural concept – the decline of beliefs in a
transcendent divinity.
Keywords:
nihilism, sublime, translation, romanticism, Shelley, atheis
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