Personification and the Sublime

Steven Knapp

ISBN 10: 0674181662 / ISBN 13: 9780674181663

Editore: Harvard University Press Apr 2014, 2014

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Neuware -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, Knapp explains the connection between personification and the aesthetics of the sublime. 192 pp. Englisch.

Codice articolo 9780674181663

Dati bibliografici

• Titolo: Personification and the Sublime
• Editore: Harvard University Press Apr 2014
• Data di pubblicazione: 2014
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0674181662
• ISBN 13: 9780674181663
• Rilegatura: Buch
• Condizione: Neu

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Riassunto

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 personition and the aesthetics of the sublime.

Personitions, 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 personitions 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.