Personification and the Sublime (English, Electronic book text, Knapp Steven)

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.