Personification and the Sublime: Milton to Coleridge

Steven Knapp

Published by Harvard University Press 1985

Personification and the Sublime

Milton to Coleridge

Steven Knapp

https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674181670

Overview
Contents

About this book

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.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	vii
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1 Coleridge on Allegory and Violence Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	7
2 Milton's Allegory of Sin and Death in Eighteenth-Century Criticism Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	51
3 Sublime Personification Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	66
4 Wordsworth and the Limits of Allegory Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	98
Epilogue: Literal and Figurative Agency in Paradise Lost Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	130
Abbreviations. Notes. Index
Abbreviations Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	145
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	147
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	173

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Edition: Reprint 2014
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 178
Keywords: Sublime, The, in literature.; Personification in literature.; English poetry -- History and criticism.; LITERARY CRITICISM / General

eBook

Published: October 1, 2013
ISBN: 9780674181670

Hardcover

Published: February 5, 1985
ISBN: 9780674181663