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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... Romantic comments on Milton , suggests that Blake is the " only exception to Coleridge's observation " on the failure of painters to respect Milton's obscurity . In fact , however , in Blake's versions Death is transparent but ...
... 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 Theory and the Critical Tradition ( New York : Oxford University Press , 1953 ) ...
... Romantic Will , New Haven : Yale University Press , 1976 , p . 211 ) ; cf. Weiskel , The Romantic Sublime , p . 139. But also see Weiskel , p . 33 , for the suggestion that the poem's power may , in fact , have more to do with the ...
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Coleridge on Allegory and Violence | 7 |
Miltons Allegory of Sin and Death in Eighteenth | 51 |
Copyright | |
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