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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... literary tradition cannot be understood in a more specifically literary way , while the philosophical issues are uniquely sharpened through their transposition into these particular literary terms . In any event , this combination of in ...
... literary fiction ( including personification ) as a means of experimenting with non - empirical modes of belief at a safe remove.14 And , the broader account might conclude , the grounds of this general post - Renaissance interest in ...
... Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray ( Chicago : University of Chicago Press , 1958 ) ; Patricia Meyer Spacks , The Insistence of Horror : Aspects of the Super- natural in Eighteenth - Century Poetry ( Cambridge ...
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Coleridge on Allegory and Violence | 7 |
Miltons Allegory of Sin and Death in Eighteenth | 51 |
Copyright | |
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