Abstract
The nature of the relationship between fictional characters and the development of character in everyday life seems always to have been taken for granted rather than thoroughly studied, yet the subject is neither simple nor unimportant. Faced with this question many people are likely to point out that writers in their works offer interpretations of individuals they have met, or produce composites of observed traits in accordance with their deliberate or unwitting purposes. In other words, the first assumption would be that art inexactly copies life.
Humanity does not pass through phases as a train passes through stations: being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind. Whatever we have been, in some sort we are still.
C. S. Lewis
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Notes and References
See Raymond B. Cattell, The Scientific Analysis of Personality (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965) p. 14.
See E. M. W. Tillyard’s The English Epic, and its Background (Chatto & Windus, 1954) ch. 2.
W. H. Auden, ‘The Shield of Achilles’, Collected Poems, Edward Mendelson (ed.) (Faber & Faber, 1976) p. 454.
Gilbert Murray, Aeschylus (Oxford University Press, 1940) pp. 17f.
Herbert Marder, Feminism and Art: a study of Virginia Woolf (University of Chicago Press, 1968) p. 105.
Karl Vossler, Mediaeval Culture, vol. 1 (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1958) p. 299. (Vossler quotes from an article by G. Gröber in the Deutsche Revue of December 1902).
Charles Williams, The Figure of Beatrice (Faber & Faber, 1943) p. 15.
Christopher Gillie, Character in English Literature (Chatto & Windus, 1967) p. 19.
Charles Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957 ) p. 247.
C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (Oxford University Press, 1936) pp. 185ff.
Juliet Dusinberre, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women (Macmillan, 1975).
See Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot (Oxford University Press, 1968) p. 146.
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© 1981 Keith M. May
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May, K.M. (1981). Creative Myths. In: Characters of Women in Narrative Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16626-8_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16626-8_1
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