Personification and the Sublime: Milton to ColeridgeEighteenth-century and Romantic readers had a peculiar habit of calling personified abstractions "sublime." This has always seemed mysterious, since the same readers so often expressed a feeling that there was something wrong with turning ideas into people--or, worse, turning people into ideas. In this wide-ranging, carefully argued study, Steven Knapp explains the connection between personification and the aesthetics of the sublime. Personifications, such as Milton's controversial figures of Sin and Death in Paradise Lost, were seen to embody a unique combination of imaginative power and overt fictionality, and these, Knapp shows, were exactly the conflicting requirements of the sublime in general. He argues that the uneasiness readers felt toward sublime personifications was symptomatic of broader ambivalences toward archaic beliefs, political and religious violence, and poetic fiction as such. Drawing on recent interpretations of Romanticism, allegory, and the sublime, Knapp provides important new readings of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Kant, and William Collins. His provocative thesis sheds new light on the relationship between Romanticism and the eighteenth century. |
From inside the book
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... Coleridge appealed to a rather sentimental , quasi- theological notion of the symbol in order to conceal the phe- nomenological and linguistic truth revealed by allegory.16 But one can agree that Coleridge's distinction is unstable ...
... Coleridge collapsed the distinction between sublime and beautiful “ by absorbing the beautiful into the sublime " and calling the resultant single category " the beau- tiful " ( " Coleridge's Revolution in the Standard of Taste ...
... Coleridge's metascientific speculations , see Abrams , " Coleridge and the Romantic Vi- sion , " pp . 126–131 . On the centrality of biological analogy in Coleridge's aesthetics , see M. H. Abrams , The Mirror and the Lamp : Romantic ...
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Coleridge on Allegory and Violence | 7 |
Miltons Allegory of Sin and Death in Eighteenth | 51 |
Copyright | |
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