Robert Doran's The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant sets out to “achieve a deeper understanding of how the sublime became a key concept in modern critical thought and of why it continues to fascinate, inspire, and perplex” (289). Unlike many approaches to the sublime, then, Doran offers neither a survey of major theorists of the concept nor a localized examination of a particular period or kind of sublimity. Instead, he focuses on how the theory progressed from Longinus to Nicolas Boileau, John Dennis, Edmund Burke, and Immanuel Kant. In this analysis, Doran builds an argument for the intrinsic coherence of the discourse on the sublime, identifying across different theorists key points of overlap that have contributed to the broad appeal of the sublime within vastly different historical and disciplinary contexts. The result is a work of exceptional scholarship, with much to offer critics interested not only in the sublime but also in aesthetic philosophy or intellectual history more generally.Specifically, the book argues that the major theories of the sublime demonstrate a unified emphasis on a particular experience of affective intensity that Doran calls a “dual structure” of transcendence—a psychological experience of being simultaneously “overwhelmed and exalted” (4). In this paradoxical structure, an individual subject's encounter with the transcendent simultaneously produces feelings of inferiority and nobility, and submission and superiority. The tension between these two poles of experience, Doran argues, creates the distinctive—and productive—“dynamism of the sublime” (11), a particular blend of pleasure and pain.Doran presents this argument in three parts. The first focuses on the first-century treatise Peri hypsous [On the Sublime], contending that Longinus presents the sublime as seventeenth- and eighteenth-century aesthetic theorists would do, as a noun associated with a psychological experience of transcendence, not a narrow rhetorical category of grand style. The second part examines the reception of Longinus by Boileau, Dennis, and Burke; while Doran contributes new insights concerning how each of these theorists becomes a pivotal figure in the evolution of the sublime, he offers an especially innovative argument that Dennis' concept of religious terror would make violent emotion central to the modern theory of the sublime. The third and most extensive part evaluates, across six chapters, Kant's theory of the sublime as it develops from Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764), to Critique of Practical Reason (1788), to Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790). Tracing multiple continuities between Kant and his predecessors, this part argues that Kant's interest in aesthetic theory is apparent even in his earliest works, repeatedly featuring the sublimity of mind.Among the book's many valuable contributions to scholarship, Doran offers one of the most insightful, in-depth readings of Longinus in recent criticism. In arguing that Longinus' concept of hypsos (sublimity) refers to a philosophical principle of high-mindedness, Doran persuasively counters the idea popularized by Samuel Monk that the Longinian sublime was a rhetorical-stylistic concept of persuasion and that Boileau was the first to theorize the sublime as an aesthetic concept. Contending that Longinus depicts the sublime as an experience of psychological elevation, by which one might transcend the human condition, Doran maintains that Longinus anticipates Boileau, whose major innovation was to supply an accurate interpretation of the Greek treatise. Although many scholars have already recognized that Longinus was a philosopher interested in a particular psychological condition as much as in rhetoric and style, Doran offers important evidence to help counter Monk's enduring influence, demonstrating the significant impact of Longinus' framework on subsequent theorizations. In particular, Doran supplies a convincing analysis of Longinus' vocabulary of the sublime—megethos (grandeur), thaumasion (wonder), ekstasis (ecstasy or transport), and ekplêxis (amazement)—that demonstrates the Greek theorist's interest in a certain category of experience. Doran also makes a key supporting argument that Longinus was fundamentally more interested in poetic genius than learned technique.Another especially significant point pertains to the intersubjectivity of the sublime. Longinus, Doran notes, defines the sublime as a distinctive encounter between author and reader in which the reader feels the same “mental expansiveness and elevation of spirit that [first] made the sublime utterance possible” (55). Boileau, Doran then argues, develops this point through an original discussion of le merveilleux, a concept borrowed from the Italian meraviglia. In effect, Doran shows how both the French and Italian concepts involve an element of “intuitive communication” between author and audience (105). The discussion of intuition and intersubjectivity furthers Doran's argument that Longinus was a progenitor of modern subjectivity, a position usually reserved for later theorists. In drawing this connection, moreover, Doran becomes one of very few scholars to recognize the significance of Torquato Tasso in the history of the sublime, implicitly pushing back against Gustavo Costa's longstanding and influential denial of Tasso's knowledge of Longinus and thus of Tasso's place in the evolution of the sublime as a theory.In this regard, Doran does crucial work filling in long-standing gaps in the history of the sublime. His discussion of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries complements the recent work of scholars who have uncovered a discourse on the sublime in early period authors besides Longinus and Boileau. These include James Porter, whose 2016 The Sublime in Antiquity identifies the sublime in Plato, Horace, and other classical authors; C. Stephen Jaeger, whose 2015 edited collection, Magnificence and the Sublime in Medieval Aesthetics: Art, Architecture, Literature, Music, evaluates the sublime in medieval authors such as Dante; and Caroline van Eck, whose coedited collection, Translations of the Sublime: The Early Modern Reception and Dissemination of Longinus' Peri Hupsous in Rhetoric, the Visual Arts, Architecture and the Theatre, evaluates the influence of Longinus on multiple disciplines—nonliterary as well as literary—in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.Perhaps Doran's most original contribution, however, is the discussion of the sublime as a cultural critique: the sublime represents a “pivot point” for the transition from “a hierarchical to a democratizing society” (20). First Doran establishes the significance of Longinus' claim that the literary sublime is possible only in a context of cultural and social flourishing, which, in turn, allows literary agents to develop the proper nobility of mind (section 44.1). Beginning with Boileau, Doran then maintains, each major theorist of the sublime suggests that the bourgeois may participate in the condition of mental elevation, in effect developing a “heroic cast of mind” that would traditionally be limited to the warrior-nobility class. By appropriating the “grandeur of spirit associated with the warrior-nobility,” the bourgeois may be ennobled through “aesthetic elevation” (110). Doran's discussion of this point offers a persuasive alternative to the view that the sublime has an inherently elitist dimension—a view that has become rather common in recent criticism.The strengths of Doran's book far outweigh its weaknesses, but I might mention a few slight criticisms. The first is that, particularly in the early chapters, certain key points might have been discussed more fully. For instance, the claim that the Longinian sublime maintains a “humanistic thrust,” having “structural affinity with religious experience” but no actual “‘other-worldly orientation’ of its own” (13–14), could have been developed in context of the critical conversation on Longinus' relationship to religion. Likewise, the claim that Dennis develops a secular-anthropological view of the sublime without realizing it, portraying the theory of the sublime as a “counterweight to religion” (140), feels a bit thin and seems to require a fuller discussion. A second minor point concerns the decision to end with Kant. While I recognize the impracticalities of including a sustained discussion of the sublime beyond the eighteenth century, I would have found Doran's evaluation of the theory of the sublime in the hands of Schiller, Coleridge, Lyotard, and their contemporaries—even if the analysis were only a brief one—extremely valuable.These criticisms are very minor considered in light of the overall accomplishment of the book—a tremendously valuable analysis of the development of the sublime as a theory. The book is very well-researched, covering a wide range of dimensions of the sublime and current critical interpretations of various theories. For a book that claims to deemphasize “ruptures and differences” across theories in an effort to identify the unity of the sublime, the analysis remains remarkably nuanced. As Doran discusses aspects of the sublime that remain consistent across different theorists—such as the idea of the sublime as “complex pleasure,” or the “heroic” aspect of the sublime—he captures many important distinctions across various discourses. And at least as impressive as the conceptual analysis is the clarity of structure and writing. In carefully setting up his organizational scheme for each chapter and section, Doran makes his complex, insightful arguments refreshingly accessible. With a remarkable combination of innovation and clarity, Doran has produced a work of scholarship that promises to be of lasting value for scholars of both philosophy and comparative literature.