Personification and the Sublime : Milton to Coleridge / Steven Knapp.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Knapp, Steven, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Allegory.

English poetry--History and criticism.

English poetry.

Personification in literature.

Sublime, The, in literature.

LITERARY CRITICISM / General.

Local Subjects:

English poetry--History and criticism.

LITERARY CRITICISM / General.

Personification in literature.

Sublime, The, in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Edition:

Reprint 2014

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, [2014]

Language Note:

English

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Acknowledgments

Contents

Introduction

1 Coleridge on Allegory and Violence

2 Milton's Allegory of Sin and Death in Eighteenth-Century Criticism

3 Sublime Personification

4 Wordsworth and the Limits of Allegory

Epilogue: Literal and Figurative Agency in Paradise Lost

Abbreviations. Notes. Index

Abbreviations

Notes

Index

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 23. Mai 2019)

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

0-674-18167-0

OCLC:

1013947109