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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... distinction between classical semipersonifications and purely allegorical agents be- gins to blur as he proceeds . The distinction is complicated by the historical claim that " narrative allegory " in its " modern " form originated in ...
... distinction between analogous and metaphorical language . " Coleridge first ascribes analogy's substantive force to its special relation to belief : Analogies are used in aid of conviction : metaphors , as means of illustration . The ...
... distinction between empirical perception and other forms of representation . This distinction was in turn conflated with the ( logically unrelated ) distinctions between literal and figurative utterances , and between truth and poetic ...
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Coleridge on Allegory and Violence | 7 |
Miltons Allegory of Sin and Death in Eighteenth | 51 |
Copyright | |
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