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
Results 1-3 of 31
... gives birth " to symbols by " incorpo- rating the Reason in Images of the Sense " ( LS , p . 29 ) . A science governed , through Imagination , by Reason is thus a science of symbols : " True natural philosophy is comprized in the study ...
... gives way to helplessness and fix- ation . But Paradise Lost is filled with moments of imaginative leisure that indulge , like Raphael , in fictional possibilities of apostasy . The modern reader turns to such moments — the epic similes ...
... gives at least the first stage of the experience an overtly imaginary character . Although genuine fear is excluded , “ we may look upon an object as fearful , and yet not be afraid of it , that is , our estimate takes the form of our ...
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Coleridge on Allegory and Violence | 7 |
Miltons Allegory of Sin and Death in Eighteenth | 51 |
Copyright | |
5 other sections not shown