Character as Form

"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 performances in theater and film, this book tests the old meaning of character against modern examples. The heart of the book is the character of the misanthrope, who, in Shakespeare's phrase, 'banishes the world'"--