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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... English Verse ( New York : Oxford University Press , 1953 ) , pp . 38-47 ; and Chester F. Chapin , Personification in Eighteenth - Century English Poetry ( 1954 ; rpt . New York : Octagon , 1974 ) , chap . 6 . 7. Northrop Frye , Fearful ...
... English Verse , and a Fragment of a Commentary on Paradise Lost , ed . Wil- liam Hayley ( London , 1808 ) , p . 218 ; and by Thomas Green , Extracts from the Diary of a Lover of Literature ( Ipswich , 1810 ) , p . 192 ( entry for ...
... English Poetry ( 1954 ; rpt . New York : Octagon , 1974 ) . 2. This is not to deny the usefulness of many additional studies , including Norman Maclean , " From Action to Image : Theories of the Lyric in the Eigh- teenth Century , " in ...
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Coleridge on Allegory and Violence | 7 |
Miltons Allegory of Sin and Death in Eighteenth | 51 |
Copyright | |
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