BALDICK, C. Oxford Dictionary of literary terms. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Character
A personage in a narrative or dramatic work; also a kind of prose sketch briefly describing some recognizable type of person. As a minor literary genre, the character originates with the Characters of Theophrastus; it was revived in the 17th century, notably by sir Thomas Overbury in his Characters (1614) and by La Bruyère in Les Characters (1688).
Characterization
The representation of persons in narrative and dramatic works. This may include direct methods like the attribution of qualities in description or commentary, and indirect (or dramatic) methods inviting readers to infer qualities from characters’ action, speech or appearance. Since E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel (1927) a distinction has often been made between ‘flat’ and ‘two-dimensional’ characters, which are simple and unchanging, and ‘round’ characters which are complex, ‘dynamic’ (i. e. subject to development), and less predictable.
GREEN, Roland et al., Eds. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Fourth Edition. Princeton University Press, 2012.
Character
[p. 224] At the heart of the trad. Of the Theophrastan characters lies the philosophical question of reference, i. e. the mechanism underlying how words refer either to abstract ideals and generic types or to concret, particular individuals. (…) Further developments take place in the 17th-c. Spain and France. In his Oráculo manual y arte de prudencia (1647), Baltasar Gracián lists behaviors the reader can adopt, according to circumstance, for self-benefit. In turn, his descriptions refer not to types and individuals imbued with definable moral qualities but to virtual convention. Finally in his 1688 Caractères, Jean de La Bruyère, like Jonson, assigns his characters proper names, seeing to mark again the union between concrete description and particular reference. Unlike Jonson, however, his proper names refer not to actual individuals but to fictional characters, thereby introducing a new referential territory, a virtual space between the particular and the generic. (…)
Ethos
[p. 464] (Gr. “custom”, “character”). In cl. rhet. one means of persuasion: an audience’s assessment of a speaker’s moral character (e.g. honesty, benevolence, intelligence) primarily as reflected in the discourse, although at least secondarily dependent on the speaker’s prior reputation.
(…) This conceptually close relation between ethos and pathos is evident not only in cl. rhetorical treatises but in the long trad. of writing characters. (…) The devel. of “humoral psychology” and such works as Ben Johnson’s Every Man in His Humour further reveal the traditionally close union of ethos and pathos. (T.O. Sloane)
Prosopopoeia
1120 (Gr. prosopon “face”, “person” and poiein “to make”). The speech of an imaginary person.
[p. 1121] A term still used for personification –the attribution of human qualities to animals or inanimate objects- to which it is closely allied. (…) (T.V.F.Brogan, A.W. Halsall; J.S. Sychterz)