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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... moral qualities or conceptions of the mind that are not in themselves objects of the senses , or other images , agents , actions , fortunes , and circumstances , so that the difference is everywhere pre- sented to the eye or imagination ...
... moral world , proves faintness of Impres- sion . " The failure to give Nature her due is a sin against the " one Life " that presumably guarantees the moral interest of vivid impressions even in the absence of overt moralizing . To ...
... moral Bestimmung remains in force as a true predicate of universal human nature despite the sheer contingency of ... morality in- volves ... no fear of fanaticism ( Schwärmerei ) , which is a delusion that would will some VISION beyond ...
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Coleridge on Allegory and Violence | 7 |
Miltons Allegory of Sin and Death in Eighteenth | 51 |
Copyright | |
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