Introduction

Summary

Personification, or prosopopeia, has enjoyed serious attention only in recent critical and literary theory. The readily spotted figure – through which a human identity or “face” is given to something not human – was for years automatically equated with “allegory.” Moreover, personificational allegory was thought of as wooden, tedious, obvious, simple, and juvenile. But a recrudescence in allegory theory, founded largely on more incisive readings of the classical rhetoricians and the Church Fathers, rehabilitated the mysterious narrative mode called allegory and in turn removed personification from its purview. Next, poststructuralist thinkers re-evaluated, along with allegory, the highly complex nature and key value of personification in literary discourse. Of late, prosopopeia has even come to enjoy theoretical primacy over irony and metaphor. Paul de Man has proclaimed it “the master trope of poetic discourse” (Resistance 48).

The present book aims to extend and enrich the current theoretical rehabilitation of personification begun by de Man, J. Hillis Miller, and others. Granted, the deconstructive theory of personification (like the deconstructive theory of “allegory”) seems to expand to the point where it encompasses all narrative or lyric. This book tries to reach a theoretical line of mediation between the poststructural posture wherein all kinds of poetic knowledge register an “allegorical” and “prosopopoetic” cognition, and the traditional critical posture that attends to canonically received (and for the most part pre-modern) allegorical texts. The first step in such a rethinking of personification must thus be a careful investigation of its formal nature, for tropological poetics is certainly the methodological common ground shared by poststructural deconstruction and traditional grammatical or rhetorical theory and praxis.