Volition’s Face: Personification and the Will in Renaissance Literature
By Andrew Escobedo (NHC Fellow, 2009–10) 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, … Continued