The book focuses on the category of character in fiction. It provides a general outline of different approaches to literary character followed by nineteen essays on individual authors from Conrad to Coetzee, on various genres from utopia, fantasy and gothic fiction to academic novel, and on characters' extra-textual contexts from intertextuality to history and autobiography. The book focuses on the category of character in fiction. It analyses characters in individual texts by authors ranging from Conrad to Coetzee considered from rhetorical, structural, functional and cognitive perspectives; in genre contexts from utopia and fantasy to campus fiction; and in extra-textual contexts from intertextuality to autobiography.
