John Baillie e la genesi moderna del sublime

John Baillie's "Essay on the Sublime" collects topics and hints from previous authors involved in the analysis of the concept of Sublime. Such topics are brought to a degree of theoretical definition that cannot be found in earlier writings. The relevance of Baillie's "Essay" must therefore be admitted considering the fact that in modern times it represents a crucial moment in the genesis of the Sublime as an aesthetic category; also, in theoretical terms, Baillie's theories are important because of the original and properly aesthetic approach that informs them, deliberately and methodologically detached from the rhetorical-literary method that had informed most of the previous investigations.