Individual and Fictional

Two recent books which talk about Jane Eyre (and one of them about Heathcliff too) as referential characters:

The Fictional 100: Ranking the Most Influential Characters in World Literature and Legend
by Lucy Pollard-Gott
# Publisher: iUniverse (January 20, 2010)
# ISBN-10: 1440154392
# ISBN-13: 978-1440154393
Some of the most influential and interesting people in the world are fictional. Sherlock Holmes, Huck Finn, Pinocchio, Anna Karenina, Genji, and Superman, to name a few, may not have walked the Earth (or flown, in Superman's case), but they certainly stride through our lives. They influence us personally: as childhood friends, catalysts to our dreams, or even fantasy lovers. Peruvian author and presidential candidate Mario Vargas Llosa, for one, confessed to a lifelong passion for Flaubert's Madame Bovary. Characters can change the world. Witness the impact of Solzhenitsyn's Ivan Denisovich, in exposing the conditions of the Soviet Gulag, or Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom, in arousing anti-slavery feeling in America. Words such as quixotic, oedipal, and herculean show how fictional characters permeate our language.
This list of the Fictional 100 ranks the most influential fictional persons in world literature and legend, from all time periods and from all over the world, ranging from Shakespeare's Hamlet [1] to Toni Morrison's Beloved [100]. By tracing characters' varied incarnations in literature, art, music, and film, we gain a sense of their shape-shifting potential in the culture at large. Although not of flesh and blood, fictional characters have a life and history of their own. Meet these diverse and fascinating people. From the brash Hercules to the troubled Holden Caulfield, from the menacing plots of Medea to the misguided schemes of Don Quixote, The Fictional 100 runs the gamut of heroes and villains, young and old, saints and sinners. Ponder them, fall in love with them, learn from their stories the varieties of human experience--let them live in you.

Jane Eyre is number 61.

Reader, I Read It interviews Lucy Pollard-Gott, who happens to be reading a couple of Brontë books not included in her selection.

What are you reading at the moment?
I am savoring Shirley by Charlotte Brontë in tandem with The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by her sister Anne. It is fascinating to compare their voices. Both authors have such acute perceptions of their characters, it is almost painful to watch the characters squirm under the Brontë lens. If I had to cite a contrast, I’d say that Anne, as narrator, has the hotter temper and the sharper tongue! Her subject does lend itself to more outrage.

And the other book is

Novel Characters: A Genealogy
Maria DiBattista
ISBN: 978-1-4051-5951-7
Hardcover
September 2010, Wiley-Blackwell

Novel Characters offers a fascinating and in-depth history of the novelistic character from the “birth of the novel” in Don Quixote, through the great canonical works of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to the most influential international novels of the present day 

• An original study which offers a unique approach to thinking about and discussing character
• Makes extensive reference to both traditional and more recent and specialized academic studies of the novel
• Provides a critical vocabulary for understanding how the novelistic conception of character has changed over time.
• Examines a broad range of novels, cultures, and periods
• Promotes discussion of how different cultures and times think about human identity, and how the concept of what a character is has changed over time

In Chapter 2: Individuals:

The word individual, whose root sense suggest a psychic resistance to being divided or absorbed into a larger social or cultural composition, thus captures the problematic status of the "person" who wishes to be original or distinguish himself or herself by some special quality. The bildungsroman is a form expressly developed to describe how persons set out to become cultured and successful members of their society and end as individuals. Here are some of the individuals we will meet: Emma, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Middlemarch, Bleak House, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Sons and Lovers, Portrait of a Lady, Madame Bovary.

Categories: Books, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights