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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... interest in literary personification symptomatic of a larger in- terest in poetic power ; poetic power turns out to stand for a philosophical , theological , and indeed political interest in a cer- tain ambivalent notion of the self ...
... interest in the thematic significance of figurative agency as such . This discovery raises a further question , which only a broader study than the present one could attempt to answer : what accounts for the emergence , at the end of ...
... interest in the distinction . Milton seems to have lacked , in other words , what might be called the Coleridgean interest in literature . A broader argu- ment might establish what the present one can only suggest : that the interest in ...
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Coleridge on Allegory and Violence | 7 |
Miltons Allegory of Sin and Death in Eighteenth | 51 |
Copyright | |
5 other sections not shown