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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... writing it in 1794 ... [ Southey's ] attorneys sought an injunction from chancery to halt the piracy , but Lord ... writer's probable state of mind . Had he not known the identity of the author of Wat Tyler , Coleridge would have guessed ...
... Writing , wherein the Poet quite loses sight of Nature , and entertains his Reader's Imagination with the Characters and Actions of such Persons as have many of them no Existence , but what he bestows on them . Such are Fairies ...
... writing under Addi- son's influence : Lord Kames . In his Elements of Criticism , Kames at first seems willing to admit “ mixt allegorical compositions " in writing , where “ the allegory can easily be distinguished from the historical ...
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Coleridge on Allegory and Violence | 7 |
Miltons Allegory of Sin and Death in Eighteenth | 51 |
Copyright | |
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