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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... Studies in Literature and Language , 8 ( 1966–1967 ) , 27– 32 ; Paul de Man , " The Rhetoric of Temporality , " in Interpretation : Theory and Practice , ed . Charles S. Singleton ( Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press , 1969 ) ...
... studies , including Norman Maclean , " From Action to Image : Theories of the Lyric in the Eigh- teenth Century , " in Critics and Criticism : Ancient and Modern , ed . R. S. Crane ( Chicago : University of Chicago Press , 1952 ) , pp ...
... Studies in Philology , 60 ( 1963 ) , 61– 62. The theatrical , even “ histrionic " character of much mid - century literature provides the starting point for Martin Price's chapter " The Theatre of Mind , " in his To the Palace of Wisdom ...
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Coleridge on Allegory and Violence | 7 |
Miltons Allegory of Sin and Death in Eighteenth | 51 |
Copyright | |
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