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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... experience rather than an act of self - con- gratulation . In both passages Burke is characteristically urbane ; in the discussion of literary sympathy he deftly attacks the pre- tensions of traditional rationalist criticism . But the ...
... experience is divided between an imaginary danger and an actual condition of safety , so the subject of the experience divides into an empirical self and a supersensible locus of value or truth , with which the empirical self is only ...
... experience , for although the story has to be told to Satan , as well as to the reader , it originated actually within his own mind , springing from his head with the figure of Sin . In introducing us to Sin and Death , the narrator is ...
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Coleridge on Allegory and Violence | 7 |
Miltons Allegory of Sin and Death in Eighteenth | 51 |
Copyright | |
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