The Poetics of Personification

Literature, Culture, Theory

by James J. Paxson

Literary personification has long been taken for granted as an important aspect of Western narrative; Paul de Man had given it prominence as "the master trope of poetic discourse." James Paxson here offers a critical and theoretical appraisal of personification in the light of developments in poststructuralist thought. He reassesses early theories and examines the allegorical texts of Prudentius, Chaucer, Langland and Spenser to show how personification works as a complex artistic tool for revealing and advertising the problems and limits inherent in poetic or verbal creation.

224 pages, Hardcover

First published February 25, 1994

Reviews

[Lancelot Schaubert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Aside from potentially being the driving intellectual force behind modern works like The Name of the Wind, particularly in the rendering of Kvothe to Kote (that is the interior known thing — quoth— to the sheer externality of a human form without humanity in the coat), Paxon's Cambridge study sets itself apart by illuminating the meta trope of all imaginative literature — poetry, fiction, plays, allegory. Of, indeed, imagination itself: the making of faces in the world, being a fundamental part of the human mind, either predicates the physical world or the physical world lends itself to construction of personifications. The deeper you go into this, the more you realize how we cannot think of anything without some measure of personification (a genre Paxon speciates into reificaiton, topifcaiton, and basically anything or person representing the personhood of another thing or person). Personification does indeed predicate anything we think, do, write, or dream.

Which begs the question:

If persons predicate all we know about our world, what sort of persons are they?