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. |
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... Collins is another matter . Recently a number of critics have drawn on psychoanalytic accounts of Romanticism to affirm - or reaffirm - Collins ' status as a serious prophet of " daemonic " states of mind.39 Such criticism shares with ...
... Collins inaccurately labels it , the epode ) suggests that more than urbanity is at stake in this complex shifting of identifications and differences . After a stanza on Fear's special popularity in Greece and another on Aeschylus ...
... Collins , and Goldsmith , p . 467 headnote ) . 50. The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope , V , ed ... Collins , and Goldsmith , pp . 414–415 ) and the fuller account of the unfinished trans- lation in Wendorf and Ryskamp ...
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Coleridge on Allegory and Violence | 7 |
Miltons Allegory of Sin and Death in Eighteenth | 51 |
Copyright | |
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