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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... seems to emerge , however , when the Old Man eventually begins to move , in the stanza following the description ( stanza 12 , 78– 81 ) : At length , himself unsettling , he the pond Stirred with his staff , and fixedly did look Upon ...
... seems to be the almost ludicrous inappropriateness of an image that seems at first , by its very isolation , to offer itself as a response to the subject's wish . In both poems this pattern of deflected narcis- sism seems associated ...
... seems almost to trigger a process of reverse metamorphosis , as if Wordsworth in this poem were undoing his own transformation of explicit personifications into natural persons and objects . In the next phase of the poem , after the ...
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Coleridge on Allegory and Violence | 7 |
Miltons Allegory of Sin and Death in Eighteenth | 51 |
Copyright | |
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