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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... question , which only a broader study than the 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 ...
... question whether the phrase " charmingly dreary " bears out Spacks's claims for the “ truly ” supernatural impact of Mallet's lines . More questionable , perhaps , is the claim that skulls , ivy , arches , columns , and broken statues ...
... question , " How is it that you live , and what is it you do ? ' " ( 113–119 ) . After a stanza in which the Leech - Gatherer patiently rehearses his earlier account , the speaker slides once again into reverie ( 127-133 ) : While he ...
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Coleridge on Allegory and Violence | 7 |
Miltons Allegory of Sin and Death in Eighteenth | 51 |
Copyright | |
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