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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... ambivalent structure . But ambivalence in " Yew - Trees , " as we have seen , reduces to something closer to indifference , an at- titude after all appropriate to the alien longevity of the yews . Occupied by figures who are neither our ...
... ambivalence at the heart of the post- Renaissance interest in literary fiction as such . The ambivalence consists in a desire to possess the power of alien or archaic belief while at the same time avoiding its absurd or violent ...
... ambivalence toward allegory , 82 ; on “ fiction , " 156n10 ; on Milton's Sin and Death , 2 , 52 , 53-58 , 62 ; on personification , 53-54 , 57-61 , 62 , 63 Aeschylus , 63 , 95 Allegory : ambivalence toward , 1-2 , 5 , 42 , 48 , 82 , 87 ...
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Coleridge on Allegory and Violence | 7 |
Miltons Allegory of Sin and Death in Eighteenth | 51 |
Copyright | |
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