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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... look Upon the muddy water , which he conned , As if he had been reading in a book ... A figure in this attitude is ... look into the clear Smooth Lake , that to me seem'd another Sky . As I bent down to look , just opposite , A Shape ...
... looks , he cannot choose but look ; Like some one reading in a book— A book that is enchanted . In Resolution and Independence , Peter's Gothic inability to " read " himself — or any particular meaning — in the river into which he can't ...
... looks at you ; Whene'er you look on it , ' tis plain The baby looks at you again . This time the joke seems to be the opposite of the grisly one in Peter Bell : what the narrator or his source has seen in the pond is obviously his own ...
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Coleridge on Allegory and Violence | 7 |
Miltons Allegory of Sin and Death in Eighteenth | 51 |
Copyright | |
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