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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... present one could attempt to answer : what accounts for the emergence , at the end of the Renaissance , of an interest in figurative lan- guage — indeed of poetic fiction in general - as intrinsically meaningful ? Readers familiar with ...
... present a shadow - fight of Things and Quantities , the former gives us the history of Men ... How should it be otherwise ? The histories and political economy of the present and preceding century partake in the general contagion of its ...
... present to the self : " It cannot in strict language be called a faculty , much less a personal property , of any human mind ! He , with whom it is present , can as little appropriate it , whether totally or by partition , as he can ...
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Coleridge on Allegory and Violence | 7 |
Miltons Allegory of Sin and Death in Eighteenth | 51 |
Copyright | |
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