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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... whole of which it is the representative . Not seeing this , and therefore seeing no medium between the whole thing and the mere metaphor of the thing , the Romanists took the former or positive pole of error , the Protestants the latter ...
... WHOLE considered as ONE " -and Understanding , " which concerns it- self exclusively with the quantities , qualities , and relations of particulars in time and space " ( LS , p . 59 ) . The apparent meta- physical gulf between these ...
... whole ; the whole does not lie outside him ; he himself is just the whole which the entire clan is . This is clear too from the sequel to the manner of waging war peculiar to such a natural , undivided people : every single individual ...
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Coleridge on Allegory and Violence | 7 |
Miltons Allegory of Sin and Death in Eighteenth | 51 |
Copyright | |
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