Character as Form

What if the Renaissance had the right idea about character? Most readers today think that characters are individuals. Poets of the Renaissance understood characters as types. They thought the job of a character was to collect every example of a kind, in the same way that an entry in a dictionary collects definitions of a word. Character as Form celebrates the old meaning of character. The advantage of the old meaning is that it allows for generalization. Characters funnel whole societies of beings into shapes that are compact, elegant, and portable. This book tests the old meaning of character against modern examples from poems, novels, comics, and performances in theater and film by Shakespeare, Moliere, Austen, the Marx Brothers, Raul Ruiz, Denton Welch, and Lynda Barry. The heart of the book is the character of the misanthrope, who, in Shakespeare''s phrase, "banishes the world."

About the author

Aaron Kunin is Associate Professor of English, Pomona College, USA. He is the author of two books of poetry, Folding Ruler Star: Poems (2005) and The Sore Throat and Other Poems (2010) and a novel, The Mandarin (2008).

Product details

• Authors: Aaron Kunin, Aaron (Pomona College Kunin, Dr Aaron (Pomona College Kunin
• Assisted by: Joanna Picciotto (Editor), John Schad (Editor)
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 31.03.2019
• EAN: 9781474222723
• ISBN: 978-1-4742-2272-3
• No. of pages: 248
• Dimensions: 126 mm x 194 mm x 20 mm
• Series: Beyond Criticism; Beyond Criticism
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; LITERARY CRITICISM / Semiotics & Theory, LITERARY COLLECTIONS / General, Literary theory, Biography, Literature and Literary studies