Literary Character: The Human Figure in Early English Writing

Features

• Cover Type: Hard Cover with 263 pages
• Published by: Cornell University Press September 2003
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0801441161
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0801441165
• Book Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Weighs: 1.2 pounds

Book Description
Chaucer introduces the characters of the Knight and the Prioress in the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales. Beginning with these familiar figures, Elizabeth Fowler develops a new method of analyzing literary character. She argues that words generate human figures in our reading minds by reference to paradigmatic cultural models of the person. These models-such as the pilgrim, the conqueror, the maid, the narrator-originate in a variety of cultural spheres. A concept Fowler terms the "social person" is the key to understanding both the literary details of specific characterizations and their indebtedness to history and culture.

Drawing on central texts of medieval and early modern England, Fowler demonstrates that literary characters are created by assembling social persons from throughout culture. Her perspective allows her to offer strikingly original readings of works by Chaucer, Langland, Skelton, and Spenser, and to reformulate and resolve several classic interpretive problems. In so doing, she reframes accepted notions of the process and the consequences of reading.

Developing insights from law, theology, economic thought, and political philosophy, Fowlers book replaces the traditional view of characters as autonomous individuals with an interpretive approach in which each character is seen as a battle of many archetypes. According to Fowler, the social human being provides the template that enables authors to portray, and readers to recognize, the highly complex human figures that literature requires.

From the Inside Flap
"Elizabeth Fowler's book presents a convincing new method for analyzing literary character, and by extension many of the social fictions in terms of which we understand one another. Her discussion is historically sound, rooted in the careful examination of important texts from Chaucer, Langland, Spenser, and others, and this book should soon find its way onto the short shelf of essential books on interpretative methods."-Mary Carruthers, New York University

"Elizabeth Fowlers learned and penetrating book on ‘social persons and a set of literary texts is a dazzling performance, from its individual comments to its rich understanding of how ‘person can relate to intentionality, will, and subjectivity."-Anne Lake Prescott, Barnard College

"Elizabeth Fowler's concept of the ‘social human being harbors remarkable interpretative and explanatory power. Drawing on legal and other discourses, it sponsors dramatic progress in the ongoing effort to bridge apparent chasms between texts, textual categories, and the ordinary social world of the reader. Her enriched analysis of characterization and figuration additionally transcends, and in fact obliterates, another specious division that has not ceased to trouble us, between ‘medieval and ‘early modern views of the world."-Paul Strohm, author of Theory and the Premodern Text