The Character and Setting and in Women’s Writing
The Character and Setting and in Women’s Writing

Summary/Abstract: Until recent times, literary history and criticism have had little to say about the character. For instance, all that Aristotle’s Poetics claims about the character amounts to the fact that “artists imitate man involved in action” (Gordić, 1996:99). Characterization is often vaguely described as “the depicting [...] of clear images of a person”, “his actions and manners of thought and life”, or as the portrayal of “a man’s nature, environment, habits, emotions, desires, instincts” (Gordić, 1996:99). Even less has been said about the ways of characterization: the techniques used in depicting characters have been listed in Wellek and Warren’s Theory of Literature, but not elaborated. W. J. Harvey (1966:192) accuses E. M. Forster of a “deceptively light” approach to the matter when drawing distinction between ‘flat’ and ‘round’ characters. This has, in Harvey’s opinion, relegated the treatment of character to the periphery of the attention of modern criticism.

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