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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... thought that gradually — if only through insistent repetition — take on increasingly general force . In Coleridge's writings , the wide- spread ambivalence toward personification acquires at once its most precise and most abstract ...
... thought to thought , and image to image , is a component equally essential ; and in the due modification of each by the other the GENIUS itself consists ; so that it would be as just as fair to describe the earth , as in imminent danger ...
... thoughts , so in this there is a disproportion of thought to the circumstance and occasion " ( BL , II , 136 ) . In the case of this stanza , however , the " disproportion " takes the particularly interesting form of a dislocation of ...
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Coleridge on Allegory and Violence | 7 |
Miltons Allegory of Sin and Death in Eighteenth | 51 |
Copyright | |
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