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 29
... kind of person- ification , or attempt to give life to an abstraction . " But there is another reason that mythopoeic works lie outside the con- cerns of this book . Much of the interest of the issue of person- ification - apart from ...
... kind , when it is not considered as a Part of an Epic Poem " ; and ( to repeat a comment cited above ) " very strong , and full of Sublime Ideas . " Not only is Milton's an excellent allegory , but " [ s ] uch beautiful , extended ...
... kind of terrors " ( PE , p . 59 ) . Yet Burke has earlier reminded us that “ astonishment . . . is the effect of the sublime in its highest degree " ( PE , p . 57 ) . We are thus left uncertain whether the real source of sublimity here ...
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Coleridge on Allegory and Violence | 7 |
Miltons Allegory of Sin and Death in Eighteenth | 51 |
Copyright | |
5 other sections not shown