Preface

Summary

As I completed the final revisions of The Poetics of Personification, I saw more and more the need to continue work on this strange device in a range of purviews only touched on in this study. I especially care to persist in examining the cultural and public constructions of personification or rhetorical embodiment in our own political and popular culture. Although I argue in this book that we have moved past a historical era when personificational literature was powerful and esteemed, I have looked suspiciously and curiously at governmental rhetoric of late: no one could miss the significance of President George Bush's charges against the One Evil Man, Saddam Hussein, who personified all the miseries of the 1990 Persian Gulf War and all the ills of contemporary Iraq. I therefore hope that this specialized book, which largely addresses a readership interested in literary theory (and in the stakes of deconstruction, in particular) and medieval allegorical literature, will prompt further interest in the continuing global implications of figural language and thought in a decisively postmodern era.

The essential frame of this book began as my doctoral dissertation which I completed while holding a State University of New York Dissertation Fellowship during 1988–89. I thank, first and foremost, my wife Tammy for helping me find the time to read, write, and revise during that year and over the subsequent three years, while we were more than busy – both working and trying to raise our two babies, Maggie and John.