Frame shifting and fictive motion in Shelley’s poetic sublime

Abstract In a key article on “Foregrounding and the sublime” (2007), David S. Miall outlined a stylistic as opposed to representational approach to the sublime in verbal art, focusing not on the object or scene that provokes sublime experience but instead on forms of poetic language that may evoke an analogously sublime experience in the reader. Miall theorized that such forms would be foregrounding devices, and his analysis of Percy Shelley’s epistolary and verse accounts of Mont Blanc identified four such devices in particular: explicit discourse of defamiliarization, deviant syntax, ultimately unimaginable images, and mind-nature blending through deictic shifts. In honor of David, this article imitates his method in order to (a) redefine the fourth of these devices in more general terms of spatial reference frame shifting and (b) nominate fictive motion constructions as a fifth foregrounding device in Shelley’s poetic sublime.