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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... claim of the following argument — a claim developed in the reading of Collins ' " Ode to Fear " ( Chapter 3 ) —that part of the interest of the eighteenth- century sublime ode lies in the tension between these two coun- terpoised agents ...
... claim for the authenticity of such appropria- tion : a man's self - esteem can after all be raised " either on good ... claims a portion of the power it " con- templates . " Even flattery " raises in a man's mind an idea of a preference ...
... claims for the “ truly ” supernatural impact of Mallet's lines . More questionable , perhaps , is the claim that skulls , ivy , arches , columns , and broken statues — the furniture of countless allegorical paintings , recreated in ...
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Coleridge on Allegory and Violence | 7 |
Miltons Allegory of Sin and Death in Eighteenth | 51 |
Copyright | |
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