ABRAMS, M. H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 7th Ed. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1999.
Proposopoeia
[p. 6] Works which are primarily nonallegorical may introduce allegorical imagery (the personification of abstract entities who perform a brief allegorical action) in short passages.
Character and characterization
[p. 32]
1. The character is the name of a literary genre; it is a short, and usually witty, sketch in prose of a distinctive type of person. The genre was inaugurated by Theophrastus. (…)
2. Characters are the persons represented in a dramatic or narrative work, who are interpreted by the reader as being endowed with particular moral, intellectual, and emotional qualities by inferences from what the persons say and their distinctive ways of saying it -the dialogue- and from they do -the action. The grounds in the characters’ temperament, desires, and moral nature for their speech and actions are called their motivation. (…) Whether a character remains stable or changes, the reader of a traditional and realistic work expects “consistency” -the character should not suddenly break off and act in a way not plausibility grounded in his or her temperament as we have already come to know it.
[p. 33] E. M. Foster, in Aspects of the Novel (1927), introduced popular new terms for an old distinction by discrimitating between flat and round characters. A flat character (also called a type, or “two-dimensional”), Foster says, is built around a “single idea or quality and is presented without much individualizing detail, and therefore can be fairly adequately described in a single phrase or sentence. A round character is complex in temperament and motivation and is represented with subtle particularity; such a character therefore is a difficult to describe with any adequacy as a person in real life, and like real persons, is capable of surprising us. (…)
A broad distinction is frequently made between alternative methods for characterizing (i. e. establishing the distinctive characters of) the persons in a narrative: showing and telling. In showing (also called “the dramatic method”), the author simply presents the characters talking and acting and leaves the reader to infer the motives and dispositions that lie behind what they say and do. The author may show not only external speech and actions, but also a character’s inner thoughts, feelings, and responsiveness to events;
[p. 34] (…) In telling, the author intervenes authoritatively in order to describe, and often to evaluate, the motives and dispositional qualities of the characters. (…)
Especially since the novelistic theory and practice of Flaubert and Henry James, a critical tendency has been to consider “telling” a violation of artistry and to recommend only the technique of “showing” characters; authors, it is said, should totally efface themselves in order to write “objectively”, “impersonally”, or “dramatically.” Such judgments, however, privilege a modern artistic limitation suited to particular novelistic effects, and decry an alternative method of characterization which a number of novelists have employed to produce masterpieces.
BALDICK, Chris. Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Personification
A figure of speech by which animals, abstract ideas or inanimate things are referred to as if they were human.
BALDICK, Chris. Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Proposopoeia
The Greek rhetorical term for a trope consisting either of the personification of some non-human being or idea, or of the representation of an imaginary, dead or absent person as alive and capable of speech and hearing, as in an apostrophe adjective.
GREEN, Roland et al., Eds. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Fourth Edition. Princeton University Press, 2012.
Imagination
[p. 666] Distinctions from fancy, general scope. Imaginatio derives from lat. imagination, itself a substitute for Gr. phantasia. During the Ren. the term fancy -connoting free play, mental creativity and license- often eclipsed imagination, considered more as reproducing sense impressions, primarily visual images. By ca. 1700, empirical philosophy cast suspicious on fancy; imagination seemed preferably rooted in the evidence of sense data. Thomas Hobbes, nevertheless, retains “fancy” and is perhaps the last Eng. writer to use it to signify the mind’s greatest inventive range. [p. 667] john Dryden describes imagination as a capacious power encompassing traditional stages os composition: invention, fancy (distribution or design) and elocution (style). G.W. Leibniz contrasts les idées réelles with les idées phantastiques ou chrimériques (Nouveaux essais). Many, incl Joseph Addison, use fancy and imagination synonymously, but Addison calls his important Spectator series (nos. 409, 411-21) “Pleasures of the imagination.” More susceptible to prosodic manipulation in verse, the term retains a higher place in poetic diction than in crit. (e.g. William Collin’s “Young Fancy thus, to me divines name”). But in England and particularly in Germany, writers increasingly distinguish the terms before S.T. Coleridge’s definitions in Biographia Literaria (1817). By 1780, Christian Wolff, J.G. Sulzer, J. N. Tetens, and Ernst Platner make explicit distinctions. Coleridge recognizes this by claiming himself the first “of my countrymen” to distinguish fancy from imagination. But several Eng. writers record distinctions between 1760 and 1800.
Since 1800 and to some degree before as well, poets and critics have considered imagination the chief creative faculty, a “synthetic and magical power” responsible for invention and originality (Coleridge). Writers have associated or identified imagination with genius, inspiration, taste, visionary power, and prophecy. (…)
[p.670] In Italy, L.A. Muratori advances a mutually beneficial combination of intellect and imagination to produce “artificial” or “fantastic” images applied metaphorically and charged with emotion. Vic’s Scienza nuova (1725, 1744) mentions a recolective fantasia but more important, examines how poetic imagination creates the basis for culture through the production of myths and universal patterns that shape understanding of both nature and human nature. Largely ignored during his lifetime, Vico produced ideas that continue to influence historiography, anthropology, education, and imaginative writers such as James Joyce. (…) The associationists –among them Lord Kames (Henry Home), Archibald Alison, Hugh Blair, Gerard Hazlitt (to some extent) and others- stress imaginative association as pervasive; it determines taste. (…) This helps expain the growing interest in literary forms and genres not rigidly fixed but fluid, also the fascination in Blake, Novalis, and others for aphorism and the importance of literary fragment in the early 19th c. The imagination of the reader becomes regarded as an important critical concept, too, ranging from Dryden’s and Locke’s “assent” to Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief”. (…) p. 672 Hegel’s Aesthetik (1835) utilizes imagination or “Geist” as a key element for his historical and critical views but does not much enlarge the theory of imagination. Goethe emphasizes imagination, though in unsystematic fashion. (J. Engell).
Personification
[p. 1025] A device that brings to life, in a human figure, something abstract, collective, inanimate, dead, nonreasoning, or epitomizing. (…) [p.1026] William Wordsworth abjured personification. (E.Fowler)