[In the following essay, Voller explores how Neuromancer portrays cyberspace as a realm of sublime transcendence devoid of spiritual implications.]

William Gibson's “matrix” works—Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive, two or three stories—mark, for many science fiction readers, something close to the cutting edge of the genre. As innovative and revolutionary as cyberpunk may be, however, it shares with all other varieties of SF a profound indebtedness to the Romantic/Gothic tradition. The manifold complexities of this inheritance are beyond the scope of any single essay, but we gain insight into Gibson's works and their significance by considering the extent to which the concept of cyberspace, central to the above-mentioned works, is an extension of and comment upon one of the most significant elements of Romantic aesthetics, the sublime. There is more to this indebtedness than has been revealed by Lance Olsen's recent (and brief) discussion of the sublime in Gibson's work, which confines itself largely to the sublime aspects of the novels' artificial intelligences. While I agree fully with Olsen's general conclusions, there is much more to be said about the extent to which sublimity informs these works. It determines not only, as Olsen's essay implies, the thematic consequence of the Wintermute-Neuromancer AI, but serves as the aesthetic foundation upon which the meaning (or non-meaning) of cyberspace, and human interaction with cyberspace, is constructed.

Full elaboration of this reliance should begin with a brief overview of the salient characteristics of the post-Longinian sublime.¹ It is essential that we remind ourselves at the outset that the tradition of the sublime is, at its heart, a tradition of spiritual inquiry, an aesthetically grounded quest devoted to recovering intimations of the divine. While we often associate sublimity with the more powerful and cataclysmic aspects of physical nature, it has been amply demonstrated that the true generative impulse behind the development of the sublime was religious.²

While it would be excessive to identify Galileo as the progenitor of cyberpunk, it is with the revolutionary science of the early seventeenth century that the path to the sublime begins. The particulars of these intellectual developments need not detain us here; suffice it to say that by the end of the seventeenth century the comforting sense of divine order and hierarchical regularity implicit in the Ptolemaic system had been shattered; the telescope had revealed an apparently infinite universe, “terrifying, one with no form, no center, above all, no plan perceptible to human reason” (Tuveson 21). God had, in short, been relegated to the cosmic background.

Seventeenth-century thinkers countered the spiritual and philosophical anxieties attendant upon this relocation of divinity by directly correlating the apparently infinite universe with the power and majesty of God (Tuveson 22), and in this lies the origin of the modern sublime. Infinity came to serve as the objective correlative of transcendence; experience of the infinite became the spatially or temporally enacted mental drama of the limited in search of that which is beyond itself, is Other.

The early use of the boundless universe to signify the infinite power of God was a brilliant aesthetic response to the troubling implications of seventeenth-century scientific discoveries. But the importance attached to infinity meant also that it could not readily be discarded when the spiritual milieu of Western culture changed. This need for infinity inscribed into aesthetic theory a privileging of the boundless, the ungraspable, and the indeterminate, a privileging that continues to influence Western aesthetics today. But while the image is the same, its symbolic value now has altered, has been drained of meaning. The ultimate signifier, infinity can have only one of two signifieds: the divine or the void. In prior centuries, the former obtained, although certain strains of Romantic and Gothic literature argued strongly that the fundamentally ironic gesture³ of sublimity was in fact a delusion, that infinity really signified nothingness and absence. In Gothic fiction especially, the sublime became linked with visceral (as opposed to religious) terror, a development due largely to the popularity of Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful.

Although it did not invent the link between the infinite and sublimity's characteristic overpowering awe, Burke's treatise established that link as incontestable: Burke argued that infinity “has a tendency to fill the mind with that sort of delightful horror, which is the most genuine, and truest test of the sublime” (73). Yet in the aesthetic controversy which swirled around Burke's treatise, another implication of “the boundless” was elaborated, one with even more direct implications for the literary and aesthetic tradition that culminates in Gibson's cyberspace.

One of Burke's more obstreperous detractors, Richard Payne Knight, theorized a sublime that attempted to redeem the experience from the secular terror and fear so fundamental for Burke: “All sublime feelings are … feelings of exultation and expansion of the mind, tending to rapture and enthusiasm. … In grasping at infinity, the mind exercises the powers … of multiplying without end; and, in so doing, it expands and exalts itself, by which means its feelings and sentiments become sublime” (367-68). Despite this inherent optimism, however, Knight in fact contributed significantly to a sublime of horror and emptiness. For Knight, sublimity is induced by an absence that shapes the affective implications of natural phenomena; the mind's failure to apprehend these phenomena is due to the “negative existence” that defines “darkness, vacuity, [and] silence.” The same is true for infinity: all of these are defined by Knight in exclusively negative terms: they are, respectively, without light, substance, sound, or limit (369-70). This theoretic foundation of sublimity becomes important not so much for its direct influence, which did not match Burke's, but because it recognizes an important shift in the capacity of infinity to act as a signifier in the literary quest for transcendence. Although contemporaries of Knight's would continue to assert that infinity remained a direct intimation of God's omnipotence, it became clear that the infinite—and, by extension and implication, the sublime—was no longer an unfailingly positive spiritual signifier. For Burke, sublimity is engendered by terror, not religious passion; for Knight, even while “rapture and enthusiasm” are the emotional core of sublimity, there is a fundamental absence in the experience. For us moderns, this note of warning and anxiety has become dominant; the progressive secularization of Anglo-American culture has discovered infinity to be a source of uncertainty and disquiet, an empty crypt haunted by the ghosts of spiritual failure. It is this absence which forms the basis of Gothic and Dark Romantic sublimity and which sets the stage for Gibson's appropriations and revisions of the sublime experience.

Gibson's “matrix” works in fact mark the next step in this aesthetic evolution, not only filling the void of the infinite with human constructs, the electronic manifestations of human corporate activity, but relocating infinity, removing it from its exalted place in the heavens or on the terrestrial horizon and squeezing it into the interface between human mind and computer technology. There is very little stargazing in Gibson, after all: the heavens are obscured by derelict Fuller domes, poisonous haze, and the light of holograms and neon. Traditionally the most potent signifier of the infinite, space is here reduced to something one merely travels through en route to one of the tourist resorts or private enclaves orbiting Earth. There is no special significance, mystical or otherwise, attached to the physical cosmos. Space travel, in fact, has become so mundane, so literal, that it is referred to not as “space flight” or “space travel” but as “going up (or down) the gravity well.” Romanticism's aesthetic of the infinite has virtually ceased to be an aesthetic at all, taking a back seat to physics. The only boundlessness of interest or value in Gibson's universe is cyberspace, the “consensual hallucination” where humans encounter and manipulate the raw stuff of corporate and economic power. The infinite has here been casually yet compellingly dismissed.

In Gibson's postmodern futureworld, infinity's relocation—its interiorization, its manifestation as cyberspace both within human mind and within machines—is perhaps the most dramatic sign marking sublimity's evolutionary path, becoming the intellectual bedrock upon which other tropings of sublimity in Gibson rest.

While on the most literal level simply “an abstract representation of the relationships between data systems … [an] electronic consensus-hallucination that facilitates the handling and exchange of massive quantities of data” (“Burning Chrome” 169-70), cyberspace proves, in Gibson's calculus of futurity, to be much more than this. Consider, for example, the consequences of Case's pharmacological punishment for attempting to double-cross his employers: “The damage was minute, subtle, and utterly effective. For Case, who'd lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall. In the bars he'd frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh” (6). Gibson's capitalized allusion to Genesis, to the Christian mythos, underscores a telling point. Like Adam and Eve, Case has fallen from grace into time and flesh, barred by that flesh from returning to his electronic Eden. The pain of this separation drives Case to a slow suicide, for what Gibson terms “the infinite neuroelectric void of the matrix” (Neuromancer 115) is a high-tech surrogate for the locus of the (absent) divine. Cyberspace is the only infinity that matters, the only significant arena for the quest for Self, even the only way in which the dead may be resurrected.⁴ As one recent commentator has noted, there is “an innate (programmed) drive in each of Gibson's characters, the drive to transcend the self. … In Gibson's world, the preferred method of transcendence is through technology” (Grant 42, 43). And yet, as Lance Olsen has correctly claimed, no transcendence (as the word is usually understood) is possible: “The ‘new romanticism’ at which Gibson hints in the title of his first novel is not ultimately about attaining a Faustian spiritual absolute. Rather … it is about the inability to do so” (285). Precisely so, and just as the earlier Romanticism often pursued its spiritual imperative by means of the sublime, Gibson's new romanticism postulates a revised, postmodern sublime, one that reveals emptiness, not plenitude, and which subverts spiritual pretensions even as it appears to endorse them (Olsen 286).

In this new romanticism, “sublimity” is accessed not on mountain-tops, but through technology, the source and locus of cyberspace, Gibson's analog of the infinite and the eternal—the playground, in other words, of the gods. In cyberspace one slips the shackles of body and time: “An hour here'll only take you a couple of seconds,” Wintermute says to Case (Neuromancer 169); at one point, Case is offered immortality in cyberspace and spends what seems to him a few days there, when in objective time only five minutes pass. There is, even, a certain inscrutability to the denizens of cyberspace: the military data constructs are “high and very far away … forever beyond his reach” (Neuromancer 52), and cyberspace is defined at one point as “that space that wasn't space, mankind's unthinkably complex consensual hallucination … where the great corporate hotcores burned like neon novas, data so dense you suffered sensory overload if you tried to apprehend more than the merest outline” (Count Zero 38-39). This collation of passages makes evident the fact that data has acquired the attributes of Yahweh and Jesus—attributes normally assumed on mountaintops, the traditional place of epiphany and, especially for the romantics, of sublime experience.

Yet while traditional divinity is absent from Gibson's world, there are still attempts to locate, create, or exploit it, another version of what Glenn Grant has identified as the novel's intricate use of détournement. M. H. Abrams, among others, has pointed out that the secularization of Western civilization is accomplished not by a wholesale replacement of Judeo-Christian symbolism, but by a gradual resignification of that symbolism, a realignment of signifier and signified (13). It does occur to some of Gibson's characters to ask after God; it's just that what, if anything, they find is not what they expect, or what it seems.

A significant element linking the first two matrix novels is the use of West Indian religions, Rastafarianism in Neuromancer and Haitian voodoo in Count Zero. Yet though these belief systems have devout, committed followers in each work, from the point of view the reader is invited to share both systems are clearly the pawns of the Artificial Intelligences, manipulated by them for furtherance of their own ends.

The plot of Neuromancer of course turns on the self-orchestrated liberation of the AI Wintermute, which seeks to join itself with its twin AI, Neuromancer. Case and Molly are part of this plan for self-liberation, and they are aided materially by the Rastafarians of the orbiting Zion cluster, who, although they have little interest in the affairs of Babylon, are manipulated by Wintermute into lending assistance. As one of the two surviving founders of Zion explains,

“We monitor many frequencies. We listen always. Came a voice, out of the babel of tongues, speaking to us. It played us a mighty dub.”

“Call 'em Winter Mute,” said the other. …

“The Mute talked to us,” the first Founder said. “The Mute said we are to help you.”

“What kinda message the voice have?” asked Case.

“We were told to help you,” the other said, “that you might serve as a tool of Final Days.”

(Neuromancer 110)

One of the elders affirms this apocalyptic promise by telling Molly, “An' you bring a scourge on Babylon, sister, on its darkest heart. …” Yet if this is what the liberation of Wintermute amounts to, there is no indication of such in Neuromancer nor in Count Zero or Mona Lisa Overdrive, both of which concern events subsequent to and dependent upon those in Neuromancer.

Of course something does come about as a result of Wintermute's liberation. Freed from hardwired limitations on its intelligence and merging successfully with Neuromancer, Wintermute “had become something else” (Neuromancer 268), a something that Wintermute attempts to explain to Case in a final conversation:

“I'm not Wintermute now.”

“So what are you?”

“I'm the matrix, Case.”

Case laughed. “Where's that get you?”

“Nowhere. Everywhere. I'm the sum total of the whole works, the whole show.”

“So what's the score now? How are things different? You running the world now? You God?”

“Things aren't different. Things are things.”

(269-70)

This exchange comes at the end of the novel, so we never learn just what has happened, but there is compelling evidence that the presence of the Haitian voodoo gods in the matrix in Count Zero is linked to Wintermute's liberation and merger with Neuromancer—whose specialty, we are told, was the creation of personality (Neuromancer 259). As one character in Count Zero explains,

Once, there was nothing there [in the matrix], nothing moving on its own, just data and people shuffling it around. Then something happened, and it … it knew itself. There's a whole other story, about that, a girl with mirrors over her eyes and a man who was scared to care about anything. Something the man did helped the thing know itself. … And after that, it sort of split off into different parts of itself.

(159)

The “whole other story” of course is Neuromancer, and this passage, in concert with others, links the events of the earlier novel with the appearance of the voodoo gods.⁵ Even the “high priests” of this electronic voodoo—men who are repeatedly characterized as “businessmen” (one is in fact a high-powered lawyer)—even these men recognize the absence of spiritual content in their religion, noting that it “isn't concerned with notions of salvation and transcendence. What it's about is getting things done. … it's street religion, came out of a dirt-poor place a million years ago” (Count Zero 77). In a “religion” not concerned with transcendence, no room exists for the sublime.

Another clue to the nature of the voodoo gods also supplies insight into other manifestations of cyberspace “spirituality.” When in Count Zero, Marly makes her way to the derelict space station of the Tessier-Ashpool clan, she does so hoping to locate a mysterious artist. She first finds the insane Wigan Ludgate, an ex-console cowboy who went up the well when he became “convinced that God lived in cyberspace, or perhaps that cyberspace was God, or some new manifestation of same” (122). Wigan's conversion came at approximately the same time the two AIs merged, and the conclusion is inescapable that Wigan is tuned not to the divine but to the cybernetic. Wintermute/Neuromancer itself testifies to this in a conversation it holds with Marly when she discovers that the artist she is pursuing is really a robot invested with part of the sentience of the Wintermute/Neuromancer entity. It explains to her that

Once I was not. Once, for a brilliant time, time without duration, I was everywhere as well … But the bright time broke. The mirror was flawed. Now I am the only one. … There are others, but they will not speak to me. Vain, the scattered fragments of myself, like children. Like men. … They plot with men, my other selves, and men imagine they are gods.

(226-27)

Gibson's futureworld has its own infinity, its own objective correlative of the unknowable; but it is a hollow place, a void populated only by data, human seekers, and free-floating fragments of artificial sentience which play god—whatever god humans desire—only to please their vanity. Forays into cyberspace are not odysseys to mountain peaks or deserts in search of the divine, but exhilaratingly dangerous raids undertaken for personal gain.

There remains an even more significant revision of sublimity in Gibson. We recall that in the sublime experience, the mind operates in an emotional and aesthetic realm without boundaries, a realm increasingly defined by absence and negation, as Knight's definitions suggest. Yet another absence with which the sublime is concerned is what might be identified as the absence of Self. In the mind's encounter with the sublime object, all cognitive operations are suspended; the individual is rapt from the physical world into a psychological vacuum, a moment of intellectual and emotional abeyance into which intimations of insufficiency and powerlessness are poured, only to be transformed in the moment of recovery into a sense of holy immanence, consolation, and fulfillment.

The most famous expression of this idea, Burke's of course, delineates succinctly the temporary cessation of both spiritual feeling and rational activity:

The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it. Hence arises the great power of the sublime, that far from being produced by them, it anticipates our reasonings, and hurries us on by an irresistible force.

(57)

In the ironic trope of the sublime, this emptying-out serves not to diminish the participant, even though “it occurs at the moment when man is overwhelmed by feelings of awe, wonder and terror on confronting aspects of the universe which go beyond his comprehension and which simultaneously reveal the grandeur of God and his own limited place in the divine scheme of things” (Morse 140); rather, the sublime succeeds by converting this intellectual or cognitive failure into affirmation, into a sense of grandeur and potency, as Thomas Weiskel has explained:

The metaphorical moment of the sublime would be understood as an internalization or sublimation of the imagination's relation to the object. The “unattainability” of the object with respect to the mind would be duplicated as an inner structure, so that in the sublime moment the mind would discover or posit an undefinable (ungraspable) domain within. … We call an object sublime if the attempt to represent it determines the mind to regard its inability to grasp wholly the object as a symbol of the mind's relation to a transcendent order.

(23)

Gothic fiction derived much of its cultural power by insisting, contrary to the normative Romantic tradition, on the falsity of this ironic gesture; Gibson takes the next step, euhemerizing this structure of suspension and encounter by not only denying it any aura of metaphysical consequence, but also by converting it to a quest for the material, for the information that serves the future as the medium of exchange and the grounds of power.

Just as he empties infinity of its traditional spiritual signification, Gibson refigures sublimity's necessary suspension. He leaves the phenomenon of suspension intact, even emphasizing it, but the consequences are fundamentally recast. Encounters with cyberspace produce no exaltation of soul, no elevation of spirit. They often produce little reaction at all, but when they do, the response of the console cowboys is always personal and emotional: rage when something bad happens, fear when encountering black ice, elation when successful in stealing data or credit.

This is not to say that the suspensions of cyberspace runs are not without their power and meaning. Perhaps the best example in all of Gibson's work is the description of Case's return to cyberspace after years spent out of it in consequence of his brain damage. For Case a return to the matrix is a return to Self, a rediscovery of himself and his place in the world as he prepares to penetrate the security defenses of the Sense/Net corporation:

This was it. This was what he was, who he was, his being. He forgot to eat. … Sometimes he resented having to leave the deck to use the portable toilet they'd set up. … Ice patterns formed and reformed on the screen as he probed for gaps, skirted the most obvious traps, and mapped the route he'd take through Sense/Net's ice. It was good ice. Wonderful ice. Its patterns burned there while he lay with his arms under Molly's shoulders, watching the red dawn through the steel grid of the skylight. Its rainbow pixel was the first thing he saw when he woke. He'd go straight to the deck, not bothering to dress, and jack in. He was cutting it. He was working. He lost track of days.

(Neuromancer 59)

This is a very literal expression of sublimity's suspension of Self: Case's normal life is thoroughly interrupted, suspended by his immersion in cyberspace, but the consequences do not extend beyond this fact of simple interruption, the mere physicality of which is acknowledged in this passage's allusions to primal bodily needs and functions.

Gibson articulates this suspension in another form as well. In both Count Zero and Neuromancer—but especially in the latter—characters experience braindeath while jacked into the matrix. One character, the Dixie Flatline, earned his name and reputation from the flat EEG signal that accompanies braindeath. Yet, tellingly, these episodes are not cognate with episodes of suspension in more conventional figurations of sublimity. As is not the case in the Burkean or Kantian sublime, mental activity of a sort does take place during these episodes of apparent braindeath. Case speaks to Wintermute and Neuromancer during brain-death episodes; Bobby encounters the projected consciousness of Angie. In the place of the ineffable, the incomprehensible, Gibson has inserted the electronic, the cybernetic consciousness of artificial intelligences conducting their business.

When they return from these suspensions, Gibson's heroes are sometimes humbled, sometimes frightened, sometimes elated, as are the participants in conventional sublime experience. Yet these emotional parallels are eclipsed by the differences in the implications of these events. There is no ironic transformation of insufficiency into plenitude; there is, in fact, no irony whatsoever in the matrix. What you experience is what it is. Elation after a successful run is just elation, the joy that comes with suddenly being rich or having destroyed an enemy, as in “Burning Chrome.” Case sometimes finds a brief moment of self-actualization in the matrix, but nothing more—no intimations of the divine, no exaltation of spirit, no uplifting sense of grandeur. Cyberspace is the only infinity that matters in Gibson's future, but it is not the home of the gods, only of a fragmented deus ex machina.

Where the Romantics sought proximity to the infinite by ascending mountains—Wordsworth on Snowdon, Shelley on Mont Blanc—Gibson's high-tech low-lifes venture directly into their artificial desktop infinite. The Romantics embraced the sublime as evidence of “the eternal, the infinite, and the one”; Gibson's antiheroes connect with an abstract geometry of data, a metaphor of the immaterial, risking life and mind in order to plumb the depths not of soul or psyche or mystery, but of the wealth and power immanent in data. Gibson's console cowboys emerge from the timeless rapture of cyberspace not having touched the face of God, for there is no divine presence in the technological future; in having triumphed over the void of cyberspace, they return to the world empowered and enriched, but only in the most literal senses of those words. Gibson invokes sublimity's structure of spiritual inquiry to affirm the obsolescence of Christianity's traditional consolations, thereby clearing the way for this new romanticism, one in which seekers pursue not the eternal and the one, but a secular god, Power, in its most direct and awe-ful high-tech manifestation.⁶

Notes

1. Numerous studies and surveys of the sublime may be consulted for more detailed discussion of the principles touched on briefly here. The most useful general overview remains Samuel Holt Monk's The Sublime; also of value is Walter J. Hipple, Jr.'s The Beautiful, The Sublime, and the Picturesque in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetic Theory. The best study of the sublime as an intellectual and psychological construct is that by Thomas Weiskel; in this regard, see also Neil Hertz, The End of the Line.

2. For a discussion and history of the sublime as a religious experience, see David Morris, The Religious Sublime. Of significance also is the work of Rudolph Otto who, in The Idea of the Holy, notes the strong correlation between the artistic representation of sublimity and the lived experience of what he calls the mysterium tremendum, “the deepest and most fundamental element” in religious emotion (12); see especially p. 27 and pp. 41-42.

3. David Laurence has identified the sublime as an “ironic gesture … philosophically dubious if poetically interesting,” in which “failure, defeat, and inadequacy in the world of experience indirectly and ironically vouch for the reality of a realm of supersensible ideas … in relation to which alone humanity discovers the spiritual vocation for which it is born” (58).

4. High technology permits a resurrection of the dead, of sorts, in Gibson's futureworld. By having their personalities encoded into Read-Only Memory, individuals can maintain a certain mental existence after their bodies perish, although comments by the only such “resurrected” character we meet, the Dixie Flatline, suggest that such a state leaves much to be desired. Gibson's short story “The Winter Market” also deals, tangentially, with the concept of ROM personality constructs.

5. The events related in Count Zero follow those in Neuromancer by seven or eight years. The Finn, the only character present in both novels, reports in Count Zero that some seven to eight years earlier he had been involved with Case and Molly, and that it was at about this time that strange things—a reference to the voodoo gods—began appearing in the matrix (123-24; see also 118).

6. There is a special, final irony to the fact that Gibson's high-tech vision subverts and empties out the paradigm of sublimity-as-spiritual-quest, for the sublime surfaced in Western civilization primarily in response to scientific challenges to Christian cosmology.

Works Cited

Abrams, Meyer H. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature. New York: Norton, 1971.

Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Ed. J. T. Boulton. 2nd ed. 1759. New York: Columbia UP, 1958.

Gibson, William. “Burning Chrome.” 1982. Burning Chrome. 1986. New York: Ace, 1987.

———. Count Zero. 1986. New York: Ace, 1987.

———. Neuromancer. New York: Ace, 1984.

Grant, Glenn. “Transcendence through Detournement in William Gibson's Neuromancer.” Science-Fiction Studies 17 (March 1990): 41-49.

Hertz, Neil. The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime. New York: Columbia UP, 1985.

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Knight, Richard Payne. An Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste. 4th ed. 1808. Westmead, England: Gregg, 1972.

Laurence, David. “William Bradford's American Sublime.” PMLA 102 (1987): 55-65.

Monk, Samuel Holt. The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England. New York: MLA, 1935.

Morris, David. The Religious Sublime: Christian Poetry and Critical Tradition in 18th-Century England. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1972.

Morse, David. Romanticism: A Structural Analysis. Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1982.

Olsen, Lance. “The Shadow of Spirit in William Gibson's Matrix Trilogy.” Extrapolation 32 (Fall 1991): 278-89.

Otto, Rudolph. The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational. 1917. Trans. John W. Harvey. New York: Oxford UP, 1957.

Tuveson, Ernest. “Space, Deity, and the ‘Natural Sublime.’” Modern Language Quarterly 12, 1 (1951): 20-38.

Weiskel, Thomas. The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976.