2017/01/01 by Koen De Temmerman, Evert van Emde Boas · 1 voice
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · Psychology · #Classical Antiquity Studies #Classical Philosophy and Thought #Language, Metaphor, and Cognition
paper · pdf · doi:10.1163/9789004356313_002
openalex publication_date 2017/01/01 · openalex created_date 2017/11/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/02
Conceptualization, Questions, Plan of the Book 'When we think of the works of Tolstoy or George Eliot, we are not remembering Tolstoy and George Eliot, we are remembering Dolly, Kitty, Stiva, Dorothea and Casaubon' . These words by Iris Murdoch (1959: 266) underline the central thematic importance of characters in narrative.1 Yet for all its importance, 'character' is a notoriously slippery concept: the continuing lack of a comprehensive theory of character has during the last few decades become something of a topos in literary theory.2 Literary character is difficult to define and grasp: it cannot be pinpointed as a delineated, autonomous or homogeneous part of the text, nor can it be reduced to a fixed number of passages.