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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... Kant which the reader will find presented at length in Chapter 3. Briefly , the answer ap- pears to lie , once again ... Kant , along with Burke and the English satirists , was aware of the intriguing proximity of hypsos to bathos , of ...
... Kant attempted to preclude . Yet Kant's proleptic answer to that reading may sug- gest that the emphasis on self - confirmation is misplaced . Ac- cording to Hertz , the point of the sublime is to arrange “ a one- to - one confrontation ...
... Kant's scheme ; the imagination is “ limited to a passive representing of the sensible " in order to preserve the self - aggrandizing autonomy of reason.28 What fanaticism threat- ens , however , is not so much the truth of reason as ...
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Coleridge on Allegory and Violence | 7 |
Miltons Allegory of Sin and Death in Eighteenth | 51 |
Copyright | |
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