What if the Renaissance had the right idea about character? Most readers today think that characters are individuals. Poets of the Renaissance were working with an ancient understanding of character as type. They thought the job of a character was to collect every example of a kind.
Character as Form celebrates the old meaning of character. The advantage of the old meaning is that it allows for generalization. Characters funnel whole societies of beings into shapes that are compact, elegant, and portable.
Reading backwards, using a personal canon of poems, novels, comics, and...

What if the Renaissance had the right idea about character? Most readers today think that characters are individuals. Poets of the Renaissance were working with an ancient understanding of character as type. They thought the job of a character was to collect every example of a kind.
Character as Form celebrates the old meaning of character. The advantage of the old meaning is that it allows for generalization. Characters funnel whole societies of beings into shapes that are compact, elegant, and portable.
Reading backwards, using a personal canon of poems, novels, comics, and...

This path-breaking book explores different ways in which writing about poetry can deepen and extend our critical engagement by deploying creatively the manifold resources of poetic language and form. Through a series of verse-essays, reflective monologues, and inventive variations on topics in literary theory The Winnowing Fan makes a strong case for revising received ideas about the scope and limits of criticism.
Norris's poems traverse the full range of European poetic history from Homer's Odyssey, through the work of French symbolists such as Mallarme, to modern writers...