The 'Powers' of Personification

The 'Powers' of Personification PDF Author: Joseph R. Dodson
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110209772
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
While scholars have often found value in comparing Wisdom and Romans, a comparison of the use of personification in these works has not yet been made, despite the striking parallels between them. Furthermore, while scholars have studied many of these personifications in detail, no one has investigated an individual personification with respect to the general use of the trope in the work. Instead, most of this research focuses on a personification in relation to its nature as either a rhetorical device or a supernatural power. The “Powers” of Personification seeks to push beyond this debate by evaluating the evidence in a different light – that of its purpose within the overall use of personification in the respective work and in comparison with another piece of contemporaneous theological literature. This book proposes that the authors of Wisdom and Romans employ personification to distance God from the origin of evil, to deflect attention away from the problem of righteous suffering to the positive sides of the experience, or to defer the solution for the suffering of the righteous to the future.

The 'Powers' of Personification

The 'Powers' of Personification PDF Author: Joseph R. Dodson
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110209772
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 275

Get Book Here

Book Description
While scholars have often found value in comparing Wisdom and Romans, a comparison of the use of personification in these works has not yet been made, despite the striking parallels between them. Furthermore, while scholars have studied many of these personifications in detail, no one has investigated an individual personification with respect to the general use of the trope in the work. Instead, most of this research focuses on a personification in relation to its nature as either a rhetorical device or a supernatural power. The “Powers” of Personification seeks to push beyond this debate by evaluating the evidence in a different light – that of its purpose within the overall use of personification in the respective work and in comparison with another piece of contemporaneous theological literature. This book proposes that the authors of Wisdom and Romans employ personification to distance God from the origin of evil, to deflect attention away from the problem of righteous suffering to the positive sides of the experience, or to defer the solution for the suffering of the righteous to the future.

The Personification of Beauty

The Personification of Beauty PDF Author: Ashley Guillard
Publisher: Live in Fantasy Land, LLC.
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description


Personification

Personification PDF Author: Walter Melion
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004310436
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 787

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Book Description
Personification, or prosopopeia, the rhetorical figure by which something not human is given a human identity or ‘face’, is readily discernible in early modern texts and images, but the figure’s cognitive form and function, its rhetorical and pictorial effects, have rarely elicited sustained scholarly attention. The aim of this volume is to formulate an alternative account of personification, to demonstrate the ingenuity with which this multifaceted device was utilized by late medieval and early modern authors and artists in Italy, France, England, Scotland, and the Low Countries. Personification is susceptible to an approach that balances semiotic analysis, focusing on meaning effects, and phenomenological analysis, focusing on presence effects produced through bodily performance. This dual approach foregrounds the full scope of prosopopoeic discourse—not just the what, but also the how, not only the signified, but also the signifier.

Personification and the Sublime

Personification and the Sublime PDF Author: Steven Knapp
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Eighteenth-century and Romantic readers had a peculiar habit of calling personified abstractions "sublime." This has always seemed mysterious, since the same readers so often expressed a feeling that there was something wrong with turning ideas into people--or, worse, turning people into ideas. In this wide-ranging, carefully argued study, Steven Knapp explains the connection between personification and the aesthetics of the sublime. Personifications, such as Milton's controversial figures of Sin and Death in Paradise Lost, were seen to embody a unique combination of imaginative power and overt fictionality, and these, Knapp shows, were exactly the conflicting requirements of the sublime in general. He argues that the uneasiness readers felt toward sublime personifications was symptomatic of broader ambivalences toward archaic beliefs, political and religious violence, and poetic fiction as such. Drawing on recent interpretations of Romanticism, allegory, and the sublime, Knapp provides important new readings of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Kant, and William Collins. His provocative thesis sheds new light on the relationship between Romanticism and the eighteenth century.

The Poetics of Personification

The Poetics of Personification PDF Author: James J. Paxson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521445396
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Literary personification has long been taken for granted as an important aspect of Western narrative; Paul de Man has given it still greater prominence as 'the master trope of poetic discourse'. James Paxson here offers a much-needed critical and theoretical appraisal of personification in the light of poststructuralist thought and theory. The poetics of personification provides a historical reassessment of early theories, together with a sustained account of how literary personification works through an examination of narratological and semiotic codes and structures in the allegorical texts of Prudentius, Chaucer, Langland and Spenser. The device turns out to be anything but an aberration, oddity or barbarism, from ancient, medieval or early modern literature. Rather, it works as a complex artistic tool for revealing and advertising the problems and limits inherent in narration in particular and poetic or verbal creation in general.

Personification and the Feminine in Roman Philosophy

Personification and the Feminine in Roman Philosophy PDF Author: Alex Dressler
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110710596X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
A literary approach to Roman philosophy demonstrating the relevance of gender, feminism and rhetoric to the history of the self.

The Personification of Wisdom

The Personification of Wisdom PDF Author: Alice M. Sinnott
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1351884360
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
This book examines the personification of Wisdom as a female figure - a central motif in Proverbs, Job, Sirach, Wisdom and Baruch. Alice M. Sinnott identifies how and why the complex character of Wisdom was introduced into the Israelite tradition, and created and developed by Israelite/Jewish wisdom teachers and writers. Arguing that by personifying Wisdom the authors of Proverbs responded to Israel's defeat by Babylon and the loss of Davidic monarchy, and by retrieving and transforming the Wisdom figure the authors of Sirach, Baruch and Wisdom responded to the spread of Hellenism and the potential loss of identity for Jews. Sinnott concludes that personified Wisdom functioned to reinterpret and transform the Israelite/Jewish tradition.

Volition's Face

Volition's Face PDF Author: Andrew Escobedo
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN: 0268101698
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
Modern readers and writers find it natural to contrast the agency of realistic fictional characters to the constrained range of action typical of literary personifications. Yet no commentator before the eighteenth century suggests that prosopopoeia signals a form of reduced agency. Andrew Escobedo argues that premodern writers, including Spenser, Marlowe, and Milton, understood personification as a literary expression of will, an essentially energetic figure that depicted passion or concept transforming into action. As the will emerged as an isolatable faculty in the Christian Middle Ages, it was seen not only as the instrument of human agency but also as perversely independent of other human capacities, for example, intellect and moral character. Renaissance accounts of the will conceived of volition both as the means to self-creation and the faculty by which we lose control of ourselves. After offering a brief history of the will that isolates the distinctive features of the faculty in medieval and Renaissance thought, Escobedo makes his case through an examination of several personified figures in Renaissance literature: Conscience in the Tudor interludes, Despair in Doctor Faustus and book I of The Faerie Queen, Love in books III and IV of The Faerie Queen, and Sin in Paradise Lost. These examples demonstrate that literary personification did not amount to a dim reflection of “realistic” fictional character, but rather that it provided a literary means to explore the numerous conundrums posed by the premodern notion of the human will. This book will be of great interest to faculty and graduate students interested in medieval studies and Renaissance literature.

Personification and the Use of Abstract Subjects in the Attic Orators and Thukydides

Personification and the Use of Abstract Subjects in the Attic Orators and Thukydides PDF Author: Robert Somerville Radford
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Greek literature
Languages : en
Pages : 60

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Book Description


The Sun Played Hide-and-Seek

The Sun Played Hide-and-Seek PDF Author: Brian P. Cleary
Publisher: Millbrook Press ™
ISBN: 1512472204
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 35

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Book Description
A young student has to give a presentation about personification—and she's petrified! How can she explain something that gives human traits to things that aren't human? If only she could take a trip to the park and show everyone the way the fountain hiccups, the daffodils dance, and the wind whispers a tune . . . or maybe that's just what she'll have to do!