1 - A history of personification theory

Summary

The sensible starting place for a theoretical investigation into personification would be a comprehensive historical survey of writings that discuss the trope. The modern critical voices placed in the Introduction of. this study are, for the most part, theoretical devaluations of personification. These voices also represent the major positions in a critical dialogue that has emerged mainly in the service of the theoretical “rescue” of allegory as a privileged, superior, mysterious narrative mode. But a coordinate critical dialogue that treats personification as a valuable and sophisticated commodity must also be articulated as a history. This dialogue also has its inception in the rhetorical treatises of antiquity, and culminates in a collection of occasionally offbeat documents produced by a handful of contemporary literary and rhetorical theorists. Ideally, mapping this second dialogue would entail treating every recorded mention of the trope personification, however brief or matter-of-fact, from the era of Aristotle's Rhetoric and forward through the history of Western grammatical and rhetorical theory. But such a compendious historical survey would not really serve to elucidate the true nature of personification; it might, on the contrary, support the theoretical camps that devalue the trope. This is because we would be faced with a mountain of summary, formulaic, aphoristic utterances about prosopopeia and its relatives. The uniformity and sheer mass of these utterances would defuse the ostensibly delicate and powerful virtue of the trope.