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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... human beings were available . And this , rather than , say , a desire for thematic am- plification , drove him to ... human actions nor human manners . " 22 Despite his appreciation of what he takes to be Milton's plight , Addison ...
... human credibility which the poem already lacks : " The plan of Paradise Lost has this inconvenience , that it com- prises neither human actions nor human manners . The man and woman who act and suffer are in a state which no other man ...
... human psyche , ” and can thus be taken as a fragmented image of " Man . " 34 But nothing in the poem directly encourages us to reconstitute these figures as the thematic entity ( human psyche ) from which they derive . Nor is the grove ...
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Coleridge on Allegory and Violence | 7 |
Miltons Allegory of Sin and Death in Eighteenth | 51 |
Copyright | |
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