Longinus (literature) - Historical Criticism and Use of On The Sublime

Historical Criticism and Use of On The Sublime

• 10th century - The original treatise, before translation, is copied into a medieval manuscript and attributed to "Dionysius or Longinus."

• 13th century - A Byzantine rhetorician makes obscure references to what may be Longinus' text.

• 16th century - The treatise is ignored by scholars until it is published by Francis Robortello in Basel, in 1554, and Niccolò da Falgano, in 1560. The original work is attributed to "Dionysius Longinus" and most European countries receive translations of the treatise.

• 17th century - Sublime effects become a desired end of much Baroque art and literature, and the rediscovered work of "Longinus" goes through half a dozen editions in the 17th century. It is Boileau's 1674 translation of the treatise into French that really starts its career in the history of criticism. Despite its popularity, some critics claim that the treatise was too "primitive" to be truly understood by a "too civilized" 17th-century audience.

• 18th century - William Smith's 1739 translation of Longinus on the Sublime established the translator and once more brought the work into prominence. Longinus' text reaches its height in popularity. In England, critics esteem Longinus' principles of composition and balance second only to Aristotle's Poetics. Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful and Immanuel Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment owe a debt to Longinus' concept of the sublime, and the category passes into the stock-in-trade of Romantic intellectual discourse. As "Longinus" says, "The effect of elevated language upon an audience is not persuasion but transport," a fitting sentiment for Romantic thinkers and writers who reach beyond logic, to the wellsprings of the Sublime. At the same time, the Romantics gain some contempt for Longinus, given his association with the "rules" of classical poets. Such contempt is ironic, given the widespread influence of Longinus on the shaping of 18th-century criticism.

• 19th century - Early in the 19th century, doubts arise to the authorship of the treatise. Thanks to Italian scholar Amati, Cassius Longinus is no longer assumed to be the writer of On the Sublime. Simultaneously, the critical popularity of Longinus' work diminishes greatly; though the work is still in use by scholars, it is rarely quoted. Despite the lack of public enthusiasm, editions and translations of On the Sublime are published at the end of the century.

• 20th century - Although the text is still little quoted, it maintains its status, apart from Aristotle's Poetics, as "the most delightful of all the critical works of classical antiquity." Also see Neil Hertz's essay on Longinus in his book, The End of the Line. Hertz is in part responding to Thomas Weiskel's book The Romantic Sublime, probably the most influential recent account of British and German Romantic attitudes towards the Sublime of both Burke and Longinus. Laura Quinney treats the attractions grim demystification in analyzes of Longinus, particularly Weiskel's. Jonathan Culler has an appreciation of Hertz on Longinus in "The Hertzian Sublime." Anne Carson and Louis Marin have occasion to discuss Longinus as well and Harold Bloom and William J. Kennedy have significant accounts of his work. William Carlos Williams also uses three lines from the work as an epigraph to the Prologue to Kora in Hell.