This dissertation reconstructs a history of popular and critical interest in the sublime across all genres from 1660 until 1830. In doing so, it investigates the rise in popularity of the word "sublime" throughout the eighteenth century as well as the term's sudden reduction in usage at the close of the Romantic period. Building on the work of such scholars as Peter DeBolla, who argues that the sublime can only be understood as an element of specific discourses, my project seeks to identify the different meanings that the sublime accumulates as it is recycled in different genres and contexts across the period. These meanings, I argue, are primarily accessible through groupings of specific terms that accompany each usage of the word sublime. By tracing the stability of these clusters of terms, even in the absence of the word "sublime", my project explores how the sublime survives beyond the Romantic period to become a central element in newly specialized forms of disciplinary writing.

Isolating and identifying all occurrences of the term sublime in a representative sample of over 3000 works, this dissertation charts its fate through the long eighteenth century, from the steep rise in interest at mid-century to the startling fall in usage by 1830. This large sample also permits the project both to identify the clusters of words that are associated with the sublime and to trace the stability of those clusters even when the word "sublime" itself is absent. Through a detailed study of the function of these groupings as an ideological device in the emerging field of political literature, as a formal structure within both gothic literature and its relationship to the self-reflexive Romantic arabesque, and, finally, in their re-emergence within the discourse of contemporary post-structural theory, this project shows how the sublime, far from falling out of critical or popular fashion, became a defining component of the specialized writing that current criticism now reads as Literature.