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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... symbols : " True natural philosophy is comprized in the study of the science and language of symbols . The power delegated to nature is all in every part : and by a symbol I mean , not a met- aphor or allegory or any other figure of ...
... symbol to the brink of megalomania or bathos . What keeps the passage in the intermediate mode of symbol is the way it blocks the full participation of the self . " I seem to myself to behold " —not myself , but Reason . I see my Reason ...
... symbol . " Commentaries , from a wide range of viewpoints , include René Wellek , A History of Modern Criticism , 1750–1950 , II ( New Haven : Yale University Press , 1955 ) , 174-175 ; Angus Fletcher , Allegory : The Theory of a ...
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Coleridge on Allegory and Violence | 7 |
Miltons Allegory of Sin and Death in Eighteenth | 51 |
Copyright | |
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