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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... least in theory , from other fictional agents is the virtually total saturation of its " personality " by the thematic idea it represents . This amounts to no more than the commonplace observation that a personification derives its ...
... least equal to Homer's Description of Discord celebrated by Longinus , or to that of Fame in Virgil , who are both represented with their Feet standing upon the Earth , and their Heads reaching above the Clouds . " 26 By later ignoring ...
... least two ( “ Ode , Written in the beginning of the Year 1746 " and " Ode to Mercy " ) were directly occa- sioned by the rebellion.49 Whether or not this national crisis in any sense underlies the uprising of Music's allegorical ...
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Coleridge on Allegory and Violence | 7 |
Miltons Allegory of Sin and Death in Eighteenth | 51 |
Copyright | |
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