Boldrini, Lucia. 2025. Person as Character. In: Lucia Boldrini; Laura Cernat; Alexandre Gefen and Michael Lackey, eds. The Routledge Companion to Biofiction. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 73-93. ISBN 9781032526171 [Book Section]

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Abstract or Description

Starting from questions raised when we encounter in fiction people whom we know from life, this essay examines how theories of character – from the referential vs. non-referential approaches that dominated the discussion until the 1980s to more recent interventions that have sought to go beyond such opposition – help us reflect on the amphibian nature of the character of biofiction, suspended between reference and invention. Three novels are analysed to develop the discussion: Susan Sontag’s The Volcano Lover (1992), with its multifaceted exploration of character as screen onto which desires and representations are projected, as economic and aesthetic object, as subject to historical forces and prejudices, or as possessing autonomous agency; Virginia Woolf’s Flush (1933), whose non-human protagonist, the dog, prompts considerations about the possibility of cognitive representation, sympathy, possession, and the nature of the (in)human; and Zoë Wicomb’s Still Life (2022), in which characters appear as ghosts, in-between the human and the no-longer human, apt correlatives of the status of the (once-human) biofictional character. All three cases raise questions of justice, pointing directly to the ethical commitment that lies at the core of biofiction.

Item Type:	Book Section
Identification Number (DOI):	https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003407515-7
Additional Information:	“This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge in The Routledge Companion to Biofiction on 31 March 2025, available online: https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Companion-to-Biofiction/Boldrini-Cernat-Gefen-Lackey/p/book/9781032526171. It is deposited under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.”
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	English and Comparative Literature > Centre for Comparative Literature English and Comparative Literature
Dates:	Date Event 31 March 2025 Published
Item ID:	38910
Date Deposited:	02 Jun 2025 12:11
Last Modified:	03 Jun 2025 10:24
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/38910

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