Characterisation through language: Perspectives from stylistics

This book is about fictional characters. More than ever before, our lives are surrounded and sometimes influenced by them in a plethora of different ways: movies, TV shows, narrative fiction, video games, etc. Sometimes characters ‘migrate’ from one medium to another or become ‘serial’ and central to people’s lives for decades. Despite all this, crucial theoretical issues are still hotly debated by critics: what is a character? how are characters different from human beings? how shall they be approached, from a critical perspective? By building and expanding on previous research, the volume starts by reflecting on issues related to characters’ ontological status and on analytical theories that have ‘humanised’ and ‘de-humanised’ them’. After that, a series of theoretical frameworks considered crucial for character’s analysis are presented and discussed, along with several examples. What these frameworks have in common is their focus on language, therefore they belong to the tradition of ‘Stylistics’. Particular attention has been devoted to the relation between language and cognition, i.e.to how character’s mental functioning can be conveyed by language. In the third section, the discussions outlined in Part 2 are applied to a case-study.