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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 the Enquiry and the paradox of its appeal to visual artists.

Chapter 2 documents that, in contrast to more recent theories that have rendered adaptation a bad theoretical object, prior to the late eighteenth century, adaptation was theorized as a good theoretical object, fostering an innovative, progressive, national aesthetic culture and situating artists in a long lineage reaching back to classical Greece. Subsequently, late eighteenth-century Romantic theories of originality and theories of the arts as separate species militated against adaptation in the same way that theologies of original creation and scientific theories of separate species would militate against theories of biological adaptation in the late nineteenth century. Even so, some nineteenth-century theorists continued to valorize adaptation equivocally as a means of civilizing the lower classes and foreign cultures, even as its aesthetic deficiencies offended the higher ranked, fiercely nationalist arbiters of civilization and culture. Copyright laws, which did not apply when a work changed medium until the early twentieth century in Britain and other nations, intensified the opprobrium cast upon adaptation in a rhetoric of theft at home and piracy abroad. Even so, some critics maintained that adaptation is original when created by an original genius; others valorized intermedial adaptation in a pseudo-religious discourse of realization of the word made flesh; yet others pitted sister arts theories against theories of the arts as separate species that cannot mate to produce adaptation, although both militated against the reproductive, generative capacities of adaptation. These discourses were not limited to academics and reviewers, but extended to the adaptation industry.

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 the Enquiry were taken to their radical conclusion, leading to a resolute change of paradigms in visual representation.