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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... empirical self - consciousness in Peirce's anecdote — a minor episode of conversion — is a glimpse of individual error in moment of collective truth . If the empirical self is grounded in error , then the truth about the self — and this ...
... empirical self and a supersensible locus of value or truth , with which the empirical self is only ironically or in- termittently identified : " For here the delight only concerns the province ( Bestimmung ) of our faculty disclosed in ...
... empirical authenticity without a struggle . The moral Bestimmung remains in force as a true predicate of universal human nature despite the sheer contingency of anyone's having or lacking the empirical equip- ment to realize it . In the ...
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Coleridge on Allegory and Violence | 7 |
Miltons Allegory of Sin and Death in Eighteenth | 51 |
Copyright | |
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