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 ) .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 ...
... reading Kant attempted to preclude . Yet Kant's proleptic answer to that reading may sug- gest that the emphasis on self - confirmation is misplaced . Ac- cording to Hertz , the point of the sublime is to arrange “ a one- to - one ...
... reading is suggested by four lines that Wordsworth later omitted but that originally followed immediately after the pas- sage quoted above : To whom the grave Is but a lonely bed without the sense or sight Of day or the warm light , A ...
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Coleridge on Allegory and Violence | 7 |
Miltons Allegory of Sin and Death in Eighteenth | 51 |
Copyright | |
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