Character and Person

Fictional character is an ontologically ambivalent category - at once a formal construct and a quasi-person - which lies at the heart of the life of textual fictions of all kinds. The book explores that ambivalence by investigating not only the kinds of thing that character is but how it works to engage readers and the range of typologies through which it has been constructed in very different periods, media, and genres. At the same time, it seeks to explore the ways in which character is person-like, and through that the question of what it means to be a social person.