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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... fiction and truth gives an illusion of genuine mediation . This Enlightenment goal , to secure empirical conscious- ness in the face of coercive truth , provides perhaps the widest background for the Coleridgean ambivalence toward alle ...
... fiction and ordinary belief , what sets him apart from his eighteenth - century and Romantic successors is his lack of a thematic interest in the distinction . Milton seems to have lacked , in other words , what might be called the ...
... Fiction " ( III , 569 ) . Addison is too much of an empiricist to imply that such fictions entirely break free of the natural ; his remark that " the Poet quite loses sight of Nature " means only , according to Earl R. Wasserman , that ...
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Coleridge on Allegory and Violence | 7 |
Miltons Allegory of Sin and Death in Eighteenth | 51 |
Copyright | |
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