1. An introduction to the sublime -- 2. The sublime of Edmund Burke, or the bathos of experience -- 3. Burke to Kant : a judgment outside comparison -- 4. The gothicism of the gothic novel -- 5. Malthus, Godwin, Wordsworth, and the spirit of solitude -- 6. In search of the natural sublime : the face on the forest floor -- 7. Historicism, deconstruction, and Wordsworth