The Poetics of Personification

An appraisal of literary personification in the light of developments in poststructuralist thought.

James J. Paxson (Author)

9780521106313, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 2 April 2009

224 pages
21.6 x 14 x 1.3 cm, 0.29 kg

"Paxson concedes the ahistoricizing tendencies of his poetics in his final chapter, which contains a short, provocative meditation on some of the questions one might ask about the cultural contexts from which the texts that make extensive use of personification arise....Paxson's close readings of particular allegorical texts are always interesting." Clare Kinney, Studies in the Age of Chaucer

Literary personification has long been taken for granted as an important aspect of Western narrative; Paul de Man has given it still greater prominence as 'the master trope of poetic discourse'. James Paxson here offers a much-needed critical and theoretical appraisal of personification in the light of poststructuralist thought and theory. The poetics of personification provides a historical reassessment of early theories, together with a sustained account of how literary personification works through an examination of narratological and semiotic codes and structures in the allegorical texts of Prudentius, Chaucer, Langland and Spenser. The device turns out to be anything but an aberration, oddity or barbarism, from ancient, medieval or early modern literature. Rather, it works as a complex artistic tool for revealing and advertising the problems and limits inherent in narration in particular and poetic or verbal creation in general.

Introduction
1. A history of personification theory
2. Towards a taxonomy of tropes
3. Narrative level, personification, and character ontology in Prudentius' Psychomachia
4. A phenomenology of personification
5. Personification, dreams, and narrative structure in Piers Plowman B
6. Narrating the personification of personification in The Faerie Queene
Conclusion
Taxonomy II and future directions in personification theory
Notes
Works cited
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary theory [DSA]