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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... poet's own recollected infancy A thorough allegorization of the Child as a personification , for instance , of our desire for im- mortality - would have the indirect consequence of allegorizing the poet himself , and thus of converting ...
... poet's self . Both Riffaterre and Hartman , then , see the personifications as authorized by their implied dependence on the poet's own agency . The trouble with this justification , however , is the lack of compelling grounds for ...
... poet's own psyche but in his capacity to resist the poet's projections ; thus Michael G. Cooke argues that the Old Man compels the poet to " a lucid recognition of the intrinsic state and force of what meets him " ( The Romantic Will ...
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Coleridge on Allegory and Violence | 7 |
Miltons Allegory of Sin and Death in Eighteenth | 51 |
Copyright | |
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