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Personification
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - Cite This SourceA personification is a figure of speech that gives an inanimate object or abstract idea human traits and qualities, such as emotions, desires, sensations, physical gestures and speech.
Use
Some simple examples of personification in English:
- The flowers were suffering from the intense heat.
- The teddy bear sat slumped on the bed, looking sadly at its feet.
- This web browser really loves to crash.
In business and political news reportage, personification is commonly used to convey a sense of agency for otherwise abstract entities like nations, machines or corporations:
In English literature, personification is oft-used as a literary device:
- In John Keats's To Autumn, the fall season is personified as "sitting careless on a granary floor" (line 14) and "drowsed with the fume of poppies" (line 17).
- In John Donne's Holy Sonnet X, death is personified as a "slave to fate, chance, kings and desperate sucking men" (line 9).
Similar figures of speech
The pathetic fallacy is the generalization of personification which applies to any description of inanimate objects or abstractions imbuing them with human-like traits. Anthropomorphism is a particular form of personification which gives such traits to tangible objects or natural phenomena. These are all allusive figures of speech called tropes.
Personification is not to be confused with prosopopoeia, which is the act of an author or writer narrating as another person or some other object. An apostrophe is where one addresses a personified or anthromorphized object.
See also
References
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Last updated on Sunday February 03, 2008 at 17:10:22 PST (GMT -0800)
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