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.

This fascinating study explores how Renaissance-era maps fascinated people with their beauty and precision yet they also unnerved readers and writers. The volume shows how late 16th and 17th century poets channelled the anxieties provoked by maps and mapping, creating a new way of thinking about how literature represents space

The aim of this volume is to formulate an alternative account of personification, to demonstrate the ingenuity with which this multifaceted device was utilized by late medieval and early modern authors and artists in Italy, England, Scotland, and the Low Countries

"Katharine Breen challenges our understanding of how medieval authors received philosophical paradigms from antiquity in their construction and use of personification in their writings. She shows that our modern categories for this literary device (extreme realism versus extreme rhetoric, or novelistic versus allegorical characters) would've been unrecognizable to their medieval practitioners. Through new readings of key authors and works--including Prudentius's "Psychomachia," Langland's "Piers Plowman," Boethius's "Consolation of Philosophy," and Deguileville's "Pilgrimage of Human Life"--she finds that medieval writers accessed a richer, more fluid literary domain than modern critics have allowed. Breen identifies three different types of personification--Platonic, Aristotelian, and Prudentian--inherited from antiquity that both gave medieval writers a surprisingly varied spectrum with which to paint their characters, while bypassing the modern confusion of conflicting relationships between personifications and persons on the path connecting divine power and human frailty. Recalling Gregory the Great's phrase "machinae mentis" (machines of the mind), Breen demonstrates that medieval writers applied personification with utility and subtlety, much the same way that, within the category of hand-tools, an open-end wrench differs in function from a hex-key wrench or a socket wrench. It will be read by medievalists working at the crossroads of religion, philosophy, and literature, as well as scholars interested in character-making and gendered relationships among characters, readers, and texts beyond the Middle Ages"--

In addition to challenging historical-critical readings in the tradition after Duhm, this book presents three ways of reading the text based on variations of linguistic theory: one linguistic, one narratological and one intertextual. In these readings the trope personification is central.

Explores how rhetorical techniques helped to produce innovations in art of the Hellenistic courts at Pergamon and Alexandria.

"Why does the Apostle Paul personify righteousness as slave-master and athlete in Romans 6 and 9? David J. Southall explores Pauline personification as a trope of character invention in which righteousness becomes an equivalent term for Christ."--BOOK JACKET.