Mood · mood_sublime
Sublime
A register of overwhelming scale or force - awe rather than pleasure. Tier 1, with an author and a date: “The 18th-century philosopher and politician Edmund Burke in his 1757 A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful made a vital distinction between the beautiful and the sublime which has shaped much modern thinking about art.” The same source gives the felt content: “Sublime experiences, by contrast – the kind we get for example from being on a high mountain in a great storm – are excessive ones, in which we encounter the mighty, the terrible and the awesome.”
Thin
Low confidencedraft
No links1 source · T1
What the research says
mood- Category
- awe
- Keywords
- sublime; awe; overwhelming; vast
- Conflicts or cautions
- ART-HISTORICAL AND LITERARY. THE CITED SOURCE SAYS NOTHING ABOUT TATTOOING and visual_traits is left empty rather than invented - the same treatment composition_triangular got from Tate in T11.9a. Registered because it is the one register in the batch with a canonical definition, and because mood_majestic and mood_dread both lean on it.
Provenance
1 resolvedJohn Bowen, The British Library
British Library Discovering Literature article by Professor John Bowen. Verbatim: Gothic characters "find themselves in a strange place; somewhere other, different, mysterious"; the mode reaches for "the sublime, to shock us out of the limits of our everyday lives with the possibility of things beyond reason and explanation". Fetched from the British Library's .cn mirror because bl.uk paths for this article did not resolve during this task.
cultural institution · retrieved 2026-08-28
Related concepts
0 linksNo relationship in the corpus touches Sublime. The graph is sparse; the type listings carry browsing.