Prosopopoeia

Literary/ Cultural Context Essay

Elizabeth M. Sturgeon (Mount Saint Mary's University)

The Literary Encyclopedia. WORLD HISTORY AND IDEAS: A CROSS-CULTURAL VOLUME.

Domains

Poetic/ rhetorical term

Dates

Places

Prosopopoeia identifies the specific rhetorical act of giving a voice to and speaking in the name of another person or an inanimate object. Greek in origin, prosopopoeia literally means “to make” (poeien) a “face” or “person” (prosopon) through the art, skill, or craft of rhetoric (See Lanham 123).

Perhaps the most popular and enduring use of prosopopoeia is to make an absent or dead person present through speech. According to Abraham Fraunce in The Arcadian Rhetorike (1588), prosopopoeia is “a fayning of any person, when in our speech we represent the person... and make it speake as though he were in the present” (85, 86). This form of oratorical performance, of role-playing,…

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

1000 words

Citation: Sturgeon, Elizabeth M.. "Prosopopoeia". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 14 July 2007 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=1734, accessed 26 November 2024.]

Save this article

If you need to create a new bookshelf to save this article in, please make sure that you are logged in, then go to your 'Account' here

Prosopopoeia

Domains

Dates

Places

Save this article

Leave Feedback