Introduction

What is there left to say about character? When New Literary History last addressed this question in 1974, the case against character seemed closed. Hélène Cixous’s essay “The Character of ‘Character’” voiced a widespread sense among literary theorists that character survived only as a vestigial form. Tied to superannuated structures and coercive ideologies, it was a concept that seemed incapable of generating new knowledge. According to Cixous, character was a product of repression, an oppressive identity card, a cog in an antiquated literary machinery. For J. Hillis Miller, meanwhile, character was a trick of language, a regrettable consequence of the misreading of signs.¹ And in its extraliterary sense, the idea of character—in contrast to more recent idioms of personality or identity—seemed quaintly moralistic, redolent of a world of backbones and stiff upper lips, of Victorian rather than modern or postmodern thought. While a still live topic in public debates about values, not to mention virtue ethics and moral psychology, the concept of character was, for most literary and critical theorists, an anachronism. Its conception of a core selfhood imbued with a moral and social typology had been dissolved in the acid bath of critical theory, or superseded by linguistic and performative theories of identity.

In the last decade, however, we have seen the sudden revitalization of a once moribund field. Riffing off an observation by Amélie Rorty, we could say that the concept of character is not a concept that stands still.² The works likely to be most familiar to literary scholars include Alex Woloch’s groundbreaking analysis of character space and character system in the nineteenth-century novel, Elizabeth Fowler’s elaboration of medieval characters as social persons, and Deidre Lynch’s development of a pragmatics of character that ties literature to commerce. What unites these disparate arguments is a conviction that literary character can disclose rather than disguise; that, via the specifics of its formal shaping, it offers otherwise unattainable insights into the historical inflection of personhood. Meanwhile, the impact of cognitive science on the humanities has triggered a new wave of interdisciplinary scholarship devoted to the puzzle of elucidating our intellectual curiosity about, and emotional attachment to, people who do not exist. Challenging the longstanding convention of treating characters as purely formal or narratological devices, works such as Alan Palmer’s Fictional Minds, Blakey Vermeule’s Why Do We Care About Fictional Characters? and Murray Smith’s Engaging Characters insist that any explanation of how readers and viewers construct meaning and make sense of fiction requires a theoretical reckoning with the similarities, as well as obvious differences, between real and fictional persons.³

The goal of this issue, then, is to capture some of the nuances and fluctuations in current critical debates about character, to craft more precise discriminations amongst its various uses, and to offer fresh perspectives on its significance. Such debates reveal often unexpected echoes and convergences across the disciplines. On the one hand, psychologists and sociologists have developed empirically based arguments that belatedly endorse poststructuralist claims about the instability of character;⁴ on the other hand, literary critics and theorists are newly attentive to its phenomenological and pragmatic salience. Character turns out to be highly germane to the relations between art and ethics, cognition and emotion, individual and social minds, history and literature, what is given and what is made. The seven essays that follow explore, in very different ways, the relations between fictional and actual personhood, between people inside and outside works of art.

Amanda Anderson introduces the special issue by noting that attributions of character play a crucial, if rarely noted, role in literary theory. Philosophical or political arguments quickly shade into imputations of temperament or disposition, with particular styles of thought being characterized as ironic, smug, suspicious, defensive, playful, and so on. In this context, liberalism is often targeted as an especially benighted ideology driven by a presumptuous optimism as well as naïve individualism. Against this view, and the concurrent dismissal of U.S. cold War liberals as conservative ideologues, Anderson offers a carefully articulated historical account that draws out the bleak dimensions of liberalism, as...