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Perils of the Sublime: Ideology in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Alastor

ABSTRACT Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Alastor represents a critical engagement with the sublime, an engagement that occurs under the sign of Shelley’s obvious attraction, in Alastor and elsewhere, to the sublime as an operative aesthetic and imaginative model. This essay argues that the poem critiques and warns of sublime aesthetic education and the habits of mind it compels. Yet, the most deleterious aspect of the sublime, and the source of Shelley’s unease with it in Alastor, is its close relationship with ideology; and this proximity is the target of Shelley’s critique, for what Alastor warns of, in the end, is the role of the sublime in the onset of ideology—a role this essay explores through an engagement with a range of theories of the sublime, from Edmund Burke’s to Slavoj Žižek’s.