Cover; Copyright; Contents; Acknowledgments; Introduction; 1 Catastrophic Benevolence, Ruinous Immortality: Wollstonecraft's Shipwreck; 2 Prohibiting the Impossible: Godwin and the Formation of the Real; 3 After the Covenant: Undead Subjectivity in Wordsworth's Alpine Sublime; 4 Trusting to the Billows: Byron's Poetics of the Real; 5 Tarrying with Disaster: Ethical Destitution in Shelley's "The Triumph of Life"; Coda. Melting the Sublime: Disastrous Objectivity in the Era of Climate Change; Notes; Bibliography; Index
Summary
Drawing on the theories of Kant and Lacan, this book reveals how modernity's characteristic stance produces an infinitely demanding ethics and a traumatic sublime
