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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... Reader will find that personifications of abstract ideas rarely occur in these volumes ; and , I hope , are utterly rejected , as an ordinary device to elevate the style , and raise it above prose . . . I have wished to keep my Reader ...
... reader of Paradise Lost , confronted by a baroque profusion of fallen and unfallen angels , by an active and divided deity , by a preternatural energy and variety in the dialogues of Adam and Eve alone - to such a reader , Addison's ...
... reader ) .3 In eighteenth - century accounts of the sublime in lit- erature , a poetic figure can become sublime either when it re- veals the genius of the poet or when it occasions a sublime experience in the reader . Both sources of ...
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Coleridge on Allegory and Violence | 7 |
Miltons Allegory of Sin and Death in Eighteenth | 51 |
Copyright | |
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