In the treatise of On the Sublime, the sublime is explained as a phenomenon emerging from the association between the innate sources of sublimity, on the one hand, and the technē of sublimity, on the other hand. This research is an attempt to take a step further in tracing the origin of sublimity, showing that the very Longinian sources of sublimity are in essence determined by other primary factors that I call in this thesis the interrelations between human culture and

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... l circumstances. In order to support this claim, I take a comparative approach in my aesthetic analysis of the sublime and I argue for sublimity of Eastern literature (specifically Arabic and Persian,) which was originated in environmental and sociocultural circumstances quite different from the Graeco-Roman tradition. The case study that I consider in this thesis is Sir William Jones (1746-1794), the founder of Orientalism, and I specifically focus on his poetic translation and analysis of Eastern literature. In the first chapter, I investigate the origins of Jones' critical thought and the ancient sources that he borrows and adopts in his own account of poetry – namely Aristotle's Poetics and Longinus' On the Sublime. The second chapter is assigned to the reception of Longinus' theory of sublimity in literary orientalism, where I discuss how Jones builds a bridge between Western and Eastern classical literature through the notion of sublimity and introduces Eastern literature as an alternative to the Graeco-Roman tradition, worthy of literary imitation in the eighteenth-century literary decadence. Finally, in the third chapter, I investigate some geographical-environmental factors that form the aesthetic experience of the poet as they affect the poet's imagination, emotion, and language.