Personification and the Sublime : Milton to Coleridge

The Resource Personification and the Sublime : Milton to Coleridge
Label
Personification and the Sublime : Milton to Coleridge
Title remainder
Milton to Coleridge
Statement of responsibility
Steven Knapp
Creator
Subject
Language
  • eng
  • eng
Summary
Eighteenth-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
Is part of
Cataloging source
DE-B1597
Government publication
other
Language note
In English
Nature of contents
dictionaries
Target audience
specialized

Context

Context of Personification and the Sublime : Milton to Coleridge

Work of

Structured data from the Bibframe namespace is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License by Bowdoin College Library. Additional terms may apply to data associated with third party namespaces.