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. |
From inside the book
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... fact " my own " -Fancy is . Reason appears to the self only in what looks to the self like Reason's self - representation . Reason , as Coleridge has noted several pages earlier , both contains and permeates the “ regen- erated man ...
... fact of the agent's deviation . Hence even religious humility— " an uncompromising judgment " on one's “ shortcom- ings ” —is “ a sublime temper of the mind voluntarily to undergo the pain of remorse as a means of more and more ...
... fact of cosmic history . " Gal- lagher does not deny that Sin and Death are made to carry allegorical meanings ; on the contrary , Milton " clothes the real children of Satan in allegorical vesture . " But their essential historicity ...
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Coleridge on Allegory and Violence | 7 |
Miltons Allegory of Sin and Death in Eighteenth | 51 |
Copyright | |
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