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 44
... passage in the Statesman's Manual . This time - in a shift of historical grounds that is itself illuminating - the agents of error are not the twin extremes of modern Protestantism , fun- damentalism and Socinianism , but the more ...
... passage is discussed by Walter Benn Michaels in a fascinating account of Peirce's attack on Cartesian intuition in " The Interpreter's Self : Peirce on the Cartesian ' Subject , ' " Georgia Review , 31 ( 1977 ) , 392–394 . 60. Erik H ...
... passage as it appears in Coleridge's text ; subsequent references to these lines are based on the standard text in PWW , IV , 282 . My treatment of Coleridge's critique of this passage ignores the complex- ities of Coleridge's personal ...
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Coleridge on Allegory and Violence | 7 |
Miltons Allegory of Sin and Death in Eighteenth | 51 |
Copyright | |
5 other sections not shown