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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... epic . Far from rejecting Milton's allegory for any inherent extravagance or obscurity , Addison praises it enthusiastically as " very beautiful and well invented " ; " a very finished Piece in its kind , when it is not considered as a ...
... epic . At stake here is the paramount Aristotelian principle of probability : Addison Ěreluctantly observes " that Milton has interwoven in the Texture of his Fable some Particulars which do not seem to have Prob- ability enough for an Epic ...
... epics after all are always allegorical . Without denying this outright , he insists on the re- alism at least of the epic surface : " In a Word , besides the hidden Meaning of an Epic Allegory , the plain literal Sense ought to ap- pear ...
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Coleridge on Allegory and Violence | 7 |
Miltons Allegory of Sin and Death in Eighteenth | 51 |
Copyright | |
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