The sublime – along with beauty the most important aesthetic category of the 18th century – experienced an amazing renaissance in art, philosophy and scholarship at the end of the 20th century. Using the examples of Peter Handke, Christoph Ransmayr, Botho Strauss and Raoul Schrott, the present study shows the extent to which notions of the sublime have proved productive in contemporary literature. Particular attention is paid to the interrelationships between the literary texts and the aesthetic theories of Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schiller, Jean-François Lyotard and Martin Seel, among others. The study demonstrates the multiplicity of forms in which the sublime appears in literature – and shows how the traditional idea of the sublime in human superiority over nature has been transformed into a poetics of sublime weakness.