...James Phelan This essay constructs a dialogue between Catherine Gallagher’s influential historical and theoretical account of the nexus among fictionality, readerly disposition, and character in the new genre of the novel and rhetorical theory’s alternative account of that nexus. In reading...

... around the individual text's strategies of characterization: the quasi-psychological (“character”-based)motivation that a given text may adduce for cultural patterns, and the way a text constructs salient features concerning a given nation as“typical” or “characteristic.” (2) “Deep structures...

... ecocriticism empathy emotion embodied simulation character References Albrecht Glenn . 2005 . “ ‘Solastalgia’: A New Concept in Health and Identity .” PAN , no. 3 Knowledge, Understanding, Well-Being: Cognitive Literary Studies : 41 – 55 . Booth Wayne C . 1988 . The Company We...

...Mark Bracher Drawing on empirical studies, the article argues that developing moral character and advancing social justice through literary study is both eminently feasible and profoundly ethical, and that claims to the contrary are based on faulty notions of the psychological bases of morality...

...Eyal Segal Vermeule Blakey , Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press , 2010 . xvi + 273 pp . © 2012 by Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics 2012 New Books at a Glance Reyes Coll-­Tellechea and Sean McDaniel, eds...

... the characters' study of appropriate gender performance; the creation of this play for the King's Men, a company whose repertoire frequently featured multiple female characters; and the peculiar acoustics of the Globe, which made alto voices particularly resonant. © 2015 by Porter Institute for Poetics...

...Erin James Highlighting a trend in current models of narrative empathy that suggests that readers’ ability to empathize with nonhuman characters is dependent wholly on anthropomorphization, this essay explores two narratives that feature chimp characters—Colin McAdam’s A Beautiful Truth and Karen...

...Marta Figlerowicz This essay explores a new trend in contemporary character construction in which a character’s memories and sensations are depicted as exhaustively etched into and retrievable from his outside environments. Ben Lerner and Karl Ove Knausgaard represent their protagonists...

... is not limited to the issues of character and characterization but also involves “various aspects,” such as the fictional world, that go into the construction of narratives, and further involves a type of readerly interest in the narrative as a whole. 22. Nabokov ( 1980 : 102) goes on to claim...

...Theo Damsteegt It is argued that in internal focalization (e.g., interior monologue or internal sensory perception), the present tense serves to establish a seemingly direct, unmediated link with a character's mind. In reports of actions, too, the present tense may have this effect of providing...

...Paul McCormick Self-conscious character narration provides special opportunities for authors to signal (un)reliability. This article focuses on one such opportunity. When narrators like John Dowell in Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier consistently assert moral and cognitive distance from...

... authors' success in the affirmation of their respective identity depends on the success of the love quest. Dante's case is especially relevant to this essay insofar as his poem instantiates his authorial identity as coincident with that of his fictional character. Augustine's confessions, however driven...

... subtly interact with humor. If the author-­narrator aims at comedy that avoids farcical polarization, then a well-­timed characterization will be required from him or her—with more empathy early in the discourse and more irony later. What we (think we) know about a character at each point...

...Joshua Parker While on a conscious level, readers of fiction take for granted that quoted text represents words spoken by characters to other characters in a diegetic story-world, Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories on polyphony and Franz Stanzel’s (and, more recently, Wolf Schmid’s) ideas on stylistic...

..., expressive realist novels mediate readers’ affective attachments to characters’ commitments through techniques that facilitate critical analysis. By describing a novelistic tradition that uses techniques of characterization to mediate feeling and reflection, this essay outlines a canon of texts suitable...

...Margrethe Bruun Vaage The article proposes an explanation for why spectators may enjoy excessive punishment when watching fiction, even in Scandinavia where harsh punishment is roundly condemned. Excessive punishment is typically carried out by a vigilante avenger, and in fiction this character...

...Jeanne M. Britton Characters in Jane Austen’s Emma (1816) frequently, eagerly, and usually mistakenly impute thoughts to others. This essay explores cognitive science’s claims about thought-attribution—people guessing other people’s thoughts—in order to reinvigorate long-standing formal concerns...

... characters and its readers. Eliot responds to this appeal by emphasizing that bodily reactions are themselves always shaped by history. However, it takes a certain sort of openness, which is learned more through interaction than through fiction, for characters and readers alike to confront the challenges...