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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... politics . As Sheldon S. Wolin has remarked , " The problems in Luther's political thought were not the product of a monumental indifference toward politics , but arose from the ' split ' nature of a political attitude which oscillated ...
... political reaction against religious violence and the epistemology of " lit- eral " perception so authoritatively converged . It was Addison's genius to propose the pleasures of literary fiction ( including personification ) as a means ...
... political doctrines , see Sheldon S. Wolin , Politics and Vision : Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought ( Boston : Little , Brown , 1960 ) , pp . 141-164 . Luther's final position on the possibilities of Christian ...
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Coleridge on Allegory and Violence | 7 |
Miltons Allegory of Sin and Death in Eighteenth | 51 |
Copyright | |
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