The myth of Europa is often referred to as 'the rape of Europa'. Etymologically, it should be more accurately 'the rapes of Europa', implying both 'abduction' and/ or 'forced sexual intercourse'. The ambivalence of the vocabulary chosen by poets when considering this myth mirrors the troubling links between the rhetoric of persuasion and male fantasies of sexual coercion, between mythology and horror. This chapter contends that the reception of the Europa myth is more complex than either side may argue, then as now. It explains that the two poles of reception, cultural and scholarly, owe much to the subtleties of Moschus, Horace and Ovid's source texts. The chapter also shows how Elizabethan sonneteers and Shakespeare drew on these multiple levels of interaction, the ways they both played on different interpretations of the myth itself and interwove it with other myths.

Chapter 4 assesses the extent of Burke’s immediate influence on academic painters and explores their predilection for dramatic or terrifying subject matter. The correspondence between Burke and his protégé James Barry is examined as an example of the fascination exerted by the Enquiry on the painters of the pre-Romantic generation, and of their keenness to demonstrate the sublimity of painting through neoclassical principles. The rest of the chapter examines other examples of academic painters who addressed the Burkean challenge from the perspective of neoclassical aesthetics, and successfully conflated existing pictorial formulae with the new taste for terror. The work of Henry Fuseli, in particular, is presented as a conscious and informed response to contemporary theories of the sublime, including Burke’s, which sought dynamism, irrationalism and affective power while remaining within the boundaries of academic aesthetics.

This analysis looks at attempts to unlimit visual representation at its edges in the ‘minor’ media of book illustrations and landscape sketches. The unprecedented interest of Romantic artists for these marginal forms of visual expression allowed them to explore the liminal space between representation and its absence, in which were articulated the essential tensions of the sublime: the encounter between images of sense and the supersensible that exceeds them, as well as the transition from the beautiful to the sublime. Postmodern theory, especially through Jacques Derrida’s notion of parergonality and Jean-Luc Nancy’s definition of sublime ‘unlimitation’, makes it possible to see these transitional and unstable spaces as significant places of visual exploration, and to explain in what way they can be seen as a response to the challenge of the sublime. The argument first focuses on the enthusiasm of Romantic artists for book illustrations, which were used as a means to structure the work of art from within rather than from its edges, and further examples of ‘unlimitation’ are then provided by changing compositional practices in landscape painting, in connection with plein air sketching and the use of watercolour.

Chapter 2 furthers the argument that Burke’s Enquirypresented a challenge to visual artists by focusing on its contribution to theories of artistic representation. It places Burke’s views on painting’s representational inadequacy within a broader reflection about the artistic medium, mimesis, and the presentation of the unpresentable.After arguing that the Enquiry outlines a shift from a mimetic conception of art to one which emphasises the artistic medium and, ultimately, the process of production of the artwork, the chapter examines the relevance of the Enquiry to modern aesthetics, by viewing it from the perspective of recent theories of the sublime (Lyotard’s in particular). This approach makes it possible to see in Burke’s conception intimations of what could be called an aesthetics of endeavour, in which the sublime becomes an immanent event of artistic production.

Chapter 8 contends that Blake’s theory and practice of art define, against Burke, an original conception of the sublime as a dynamic process located within creative activity itself rather than an empirical experience founded on passive psychological and physiological responses to external sources of terror. It argues that this shift allows Blake to give a new significance to visual representation, which is no longer cut off from the sublime, but becomes a necessary process towards it. Blake’s prophetic cycle is read as a dramatisation of the incommensurability of Vision and sensible form, which articulates the predicament of the artist, caught between the necessity to present forms, and the awareness that material representation is the first step toward a fall from Vision. The necessity of artistic production prevails because, according to Blake, it is the energetic endeavour to produce forms which demonstrates the imaginative power of the artist, which in fact is sublime in itself. This is made manisfest by the artist’s emphasis on line, and the high degree of medium reflexivity in his illuminated books.

This chapter argues that one of the most efficient strategies of visualisation of the sublime was found in ruin paintings and architectural fantasies, more specifically in the exploration of architectural fragments as a source of formal inventiveness and indeterminacy. The argument suggests that the capriccio genre, especially as it had been developed by Piranesi, provided a combination of irrationality, indeterminacy and boundlessness that made it possible to deny the figurative limitations of the visual arts, and addressed the formal issues that were raised by Burke’s Enquiry. As a result, it could be seen as a major influence on Romantic visual practices, in their quest for the sublime, as may be attested by the works of Joseph Gandy and J.M.W. Turner.

The Merchant of Venice abounds in allusions to the myth of the Golden Fleece, unlike the rest of the canon where key terms associated with the myth are rarely mentioned explicitly. The myth circulated widely in sixteenth-century Europe. This chapter analyses the significance of the Golden Fleece myth as a subtext of The Merchant of Venice. It contends that its contribution to the dramatic texture and spatial mapping of the play extends well beyond Ovidian and Senecan interactions. The Golden Fleece myth and biblical parables are brought together in an intricate network of ovine images that radiates through the whole play, inviting audiences to revisit initial, male-induced representations of the play's three female figures, Portia, Nerissa and Jessica. The Venetian Jasons are the product of myth and its reconfigurations, which are interwoven historically and contemporaneously.

Through an analysis of Love's Mistress, this chapter addresses how cultural tastes and approaches to classical learning evolved in the first half of the seventeenth century, and highlights the influence of French fashions. It considers why Love's Mistress was so successful with its elite public, despite or perhaps because of its sturdy, potentially subversive comedy. The chapter first explores the elite/popular divide through a comparison with the vogue for burlesque in seventeenth-century France - the native country of Queen Henrietta Maria. Second, it argues that taking sides in the play's several controversies matters less than appreciating the situations of arbitration that Heywood consistently emphasises, making this a play not just about mythology, but about the critical apprehension of mythology and drama. Finally, the chapter addresses the generic complexity of Love's Mistress, including its relationship to Heywood's earlier Ages, contemporary pageants, and masques.

This first chapter emphasises what Burke’s Enquiry owes to the existing discourse on the sublime (to Longinus and Addison in particular), in order to highlight its innovations, more specifically its aesthetically stimulating irrationalism and sensualism. It then focuses on Burke’s unique distinction between visual and verbal representation, his rejection of their common mimetic basis, and his argument that only the non-mimetic, suggestive medium of the verbal arts, language, may impart the sublime. At a time when parallels between the arts prevailed, this was an isolated point of view, which introduced a new paragone situation, and a challenge to visual artists. The end of the chapter examines a number of competing theories of the sublime that were compatible with painting, which makes it possible to enhance the specificity of theEnquiry and the paradox of its appeal to visual artists.

This final chapter concludes the study with another major figure of British art, Joseph Mallord William Turner. Turner’s lifelong ambition to emulate the powers of poetry is shown to have led him to provide one of the most adequate pictorial responses to the challenge initiated by Burke’s Enquiry. After examining the various channels through which eighteenth-century theories of the sublime reached Turner, the argument focuses on his radical transformation of the pictorial medium, as a means to overcome the mimetic limitations of visual representation and articulate the presentation of the unpresentable. His art is understood as the culmination of the reflection about the artistic medium which had been set in motion by the quest for the sublime, and by the growing awareness of inadequacies inherent to mimetic pictorial representation. It may be seen as the place where the aesthetics of theEnquiry were taken to their radical conclusion, leading to a resolute change of paradigms in visual representation.

In the poetic collection Hesperides, Robert Herrick includes the brief verse 'To his booke', in which he addresses his own literary creation. Apsyrtus is the younger brother of the classical sorceress and infanticide Medea. Although he plays a relatively minor part in Medea's story, Apsyrtus is also foregrounded in one of William Shakespeare's only direct references to Medea's myth, in 2 Henry VI. In the essay 'Why did Medea kill her brother Apsyrtus?' Jan N. Bremmer surveys ancient versions of Medea's fratricide. He shows how the tale gradually evolved from the third century BCE version of Apollonius Rhodius to the much more common classical story, referenced by Euripides, and subsequently by Ovid and Seneca. Unsurprisingly, the fratricide directly contravened early modern as well as classical thinking about women's obedience and, particularly, about the 'ideal' relationship between brothers and sisters.