Literary Character
A literary character refers to a person, animal, or entity portrayed in a work of literature. These characters are often developed with distinct personalities, traits, and motivations, and they drive the plot and themes of the story. Through their actions and interactions, literary characters provide insight into human nature and the human experience.
4 Key excerpts on "Literary Character"
eBook - ePubNarrative Form
Revised and Expanded Second Edition
- Suzanne Keen(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
...The questions that students of narrative ask about character thus range widely. They may address the fictive personality of the character: Why is Mr Woodhouse, Emma’s father, so stingy? They may react to generic expectations: Does Thomas Hardy succeed in making Henchard a tragic hero? They may focus on external details: How does Dorothea Brooke’s clothing reveal her attitudes and ideals? They may draw attention to representations of characters’ embodiment: How do these details shape the characters’ thoughts and actions and plot trajectories? They may emphasize conflicting responses: Why do contemporary readers find Little Nell sappy and implausible when Victorians found her believable and moving? They may focus on matters of narrative technique: Why (in July’s People (1981)) does Nadine Gordimer allow the reader to have access to the adult characters’ minds, but not to the children’s minds? They may establish criteria for success or failure on the part of a writer: Does the author invoke sympathy for the characters or do they ‘fail to come to life’ for the reader? Indeed, the response to character is so profound a part of the reading and viewing experience that some students will be content to organize most of their critical observations about a narrative around questions about its creation and use of characters. Terms Characters, those anthropomorphic entities who carry out the plot actions of narratives, strongly resemble real people (or plausible people in fantastic situations). Certainly many narratives, from children’s stories to beast fables to novels like Richard Adams’s Watership Down (1972), employ animals as characters. All of these animals open up to interpretation as human-like as soon as thoughts, feelings, speech, or motivations are attributed to them, or as soon as an artist draws them with human-like faces in comics or graphic narratives...
eBook - ePubDeveloping Young Writers in the Classroom
I've got something to say
- Gail Loane(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...9 Character Portrait Describing people Readers want to see people on the page, hear them talk, watch them in dramatic action and reaction with people. They like to read anecdotes, the little scenes in which people reveal both themselves and the subject. Readers want to meet people with whom they can identify, and often readers become, for a few moments, the person on the page, and so extend their experience by living another life. Readers also enjoy a strong sense of place and time: they like to see the people they read about in their world – to be shown as well as told. (from Learning by Teaching by Donald Murray 1982) As we are coaching our students in their mastery of language, we find in our own reading that we become more finely attuned to what writers do in order to tell their story, or to inform or to entertain. Our students, in turn, will notice the importance of what a writer has included, once we show them. Learning to describe a character can be an end in itself, or it can be a major component of an extended narrative. When we read novels or short stories, watch movies or plays, our main interest is with the characters: what they are like, how they behave and how their experiences affect their lives. We respond to these characters, and like them or not, develop relationships with them. All human beings can be discussed on any or all of a range of levels, from a simple physical level through to a more complex level of thoughts and actions. Portrayals of characters in narrative, in written or dramatic text, need to give the reader or viewer enough information to make the relationships satisfying: we need to feel that we get to know them. Novelists and playwrights may be criticised if they fail to provide this information; critics may note that they were left feeling that they knew about the characters, but they didn’t know them...
eBook - ePub- Tonya Krouse, Tamara F. O'Callaghan(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
...With this definition in place, practitioners argue that Literature reveals and gives individuals a path toward understanding their humanity. Literature tells stories that connect to people’s day-to-day lives or to the lives of people whose circumstances differ from theirs, while at the same time emphasizing the beauty that language makes possible. Literature reflects the world that individuals inhabit, and it also amplifies and imagines that world in ways that enrich understanding. Often, people are introduced to Literature as a special kind of writing, which uses particular figures of speech and formal techniques to represent reality. Beyond that, advanced literary study shows that Literature can do more than hold a mirror up to people’s personal experience: it can challenge their ideas about what it means to be human and help people to perceive ways of living and thinking that are different from their own. Literature does not just offer something with which an individual can identify. It also allows readers to imagine possibilities beyond their own limited perspectives. The reasons that we should study and interpret Literature connect to a basic belief: Literature provides readers with insight into their own experiences and with alternative possibilities for how to live in the world. With this belief in mind, the study of Literature emphasizes the significance of asking questions, not the end result of arriving at definitive answers or final interpretations. Scholarly methods in the study of Literature provide a rigorous, critical framework for making sense of narratives, stories, rhythms, and sounds of language. Relating to a literary text may inspire our interest or curiosity, but relating is only a beginning: studying Literature means understanding what we read, making sense of it, and connecting it to broader and deeper contemplation about humanity...
eBook - ePubEnglish as a Creative Art
Literacy Concepts Linked to Creative Writing
- Linden Peach, Angela Burton(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- David Fulton Publishers(Publisher)
...For example, the particularities, idiosyncrasies and details of personality – or in sum the idea of character traits – can be applied both to real people and to fictional characters in novels or drama. So we might be forgiven for commonly forgetting to differentiate between characters and real people when we read fiction. In some cases the word ‘character’ seems synonymous with the ideas of personality and personal identity, of both fictional characters and real people, through their links with behaviour and actions. We might conclude from a person’s behaviour that he is a ‘bad character’. We also tend to conflate character and personal integrity or moral worth, as in the statement ‘she is of upstanding character’. The phrases ‘in character’ and ‘out of character’ seem to imply that both fictional characters and real people have some kind of central static core or a coherence and consistency of character. In other words, they have a stable personality or fixed identity, by which we come to know them, and against which they can be measured as acting ‘out of character’. The word ‘character’ has also been used to establish taxonomies, or different classifications, of people, which have in turn been related to biological or racial groupings. Finally, the word also relates to signs, symbols, and particularly to language because it can mean a sign, a ‘distinctive mark’ or a set of signs together, forming ‘description’ and ‘inscription’. The ‘Common-Sense’ View of Character Modern literary studies take issue with the traditional way of looking at character – what we might call the ‘common-sense’ view of character. How might we describe this? Basically, it refers to our tendency to respond to characters as though they were real people. Despite our knowing, at one level, that Literary Characters are fictional, at another level we are seduced into believing that at times they are as real as ourselves...
