Abstract

The article concerns selected important issues of poetics and its history. The authors analyze and interpret the history of the notion of the sublime. The article is an introduction to a theoretical part of a book about a possible theory of the literary work of art and communication that results from the experience of the sublime. The introductory article presents to the reader questions which are relevant to the sublime mainly in contemporary theoretical reflection. The survey accounts for the period from the first century AD till twentieth century and deals with the theories of the sublime by Pseudo-Longinos, Nicolas Boileau, Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich Georg Wilhelm Hegel, Artur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, J.-F. Lyotard and others.