Research On Burke's Aesthetic Key Words From The Perspective Of Comparative Study

Edmund Burke is a famous British politician, esthetician. In the history of aesthetics, Burke is famous of his book, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. His theory of sublime is a significant link in that chain of the aesthetic history on sublime, an important aesthetic category. But after carefully reading the writings of Burke, actually, we found there is some distance between existing research on Burke and the real one in the vision of aesthetic history. They mainly focus on Burke's aesthetic thought of "beauty" and "sublime", and there is a certain academic misreading of Burke about the beauty's meaning. In recent years, with the publication of the translated Burke's works and his biography. After carefully reading the text, we found that he wrote a lot to express his views on the "obscurity" and "small" and "female", and this is an urgent problem to be solved that how to research these words and what's the position of these words in his thought system. For these reasons, this paper tries to research the problems from the following several parts:the introduction, we focus on the research status of the key words of Burke's aesthetics. The first part is the discussion of "obscurity". Burke believes that the obscurity has created a sense of sublime, the images of poetry should be obscure images. In the second part, we focus on Burke's aesthetic thoughts about small. We believe that it is not a proportion concept in the strict sense, but a kind of aesthetic experience after the emotional internalization. In the third part, we focus on "female". Burke's aesthetic thought has a strong gender theory, he thought that beauty was ascribed to the female attributes, however, certainly this kind of aesthetics has not been recognized neither by male nor by female.