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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... fanaticism ( such at least was the original import ) is derived from the swarming of bees , namely , Schwär- men ... fanaticism , but rather the medium between these two opposite extremes : " The sanity of the mind is between ...
... fanaticism may be compared to mania ( Wahnwitz ) . Of these the latter is least of all compatible with the sublime , for it is profoundly ridiculous . In enthusiasm , as an affection , the imagination is unbridled ; in fanaticism , as a ...
Milton to Coleridge Steven Knapp. limity ; to appreciate the paradox of fanaticism one must not be a fanatic . Fanaticism stands both for the aim and the destruction of sublime identification ; the moment of identity is also a lapse into ...
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Coleridge on Allegory and Violence | 7 |
Miltons Allegory of Sin and Death in Eighteenth | 51 |
Copyright | |
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