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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... person- ification , or attempt to give life to an abstraction . " But there is another reason that mythopoeic works lie outside the con- cerns of this book . Much of the interest of the issue of person- ification - apart from its value ...
... Persons " - " the Celestial , the Infernal , the Human , and the Imaginary . " This arrangement places the topic of ... Person as entirely Shadowy and unsubstantial , the Heathens made Statues of him , placed him in their Temples , and ...
... person of the narrator . The difference in ' Yew - Trees ' is of course that the narrator's thoughts , the ghosts , take his place as listener . " 25 To Geoffrey H. Hartman , the supplanting of an explicit narrator by personifications ...
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Coleridge on Allegory and Violence | 7 |
Miltons Allegory of Sin and Death in Eighteenth | 51 |
Copyright | |
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