personification

1. The act of personifying.
2. A person or thing typifying a certain quality or idea; an embodiment or exemplification: "He's invisible, a walking personification of the Negative" (Ralph Ellison).
3. A figure of speech in which inanimate objects or abstractions are endowed with human qualities or are represented as possessing human form, as in Hunger sat shivering on the road or Flowers danced about the lawn. Also called prosopopeia.
4. Artistic representation of an abstract quality or idea as a person.

noun

A physical entity typifying an abstraction: embodiment, exteriorization, externalization, incarnation, manifestation, materialization, objectification, personalization, substantiation, type. Rhetoric prosopopeia. See substitute.

personification, a figure of speech by which animals, abstract ideas, or inanimate things are referred to as if they were human, as in Sir Philip Sidney's line:

Invention, Nature's child, fled stepdame Study's blows

Verb: personify.

Representation of a human figure with attributes to suggest an abstraction, such as Hope with Anchor. Cesare Ripa's Iconologia (1593) was an important source-book for personification.

Bibliography

• Lampugnani (ed.) & Dinsmoor (1986)

The full bibliography for this book is available to download as a pdf file.
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A type of metaphor in which distinctive human characteristics, e.g., honesty, emotion, volition, etc., are attributed to an animal, object or idea.

Constance and Fortitude in Vienna

Personification is an ontological metaphor in which a thing or abstraction is represented as a person.^[1]

The term "personification" may apply to:

• A description of an inanimate object as being a living person or animal as in: "The sun shone brightly down on me as if she were shining for me alone". In this example the sun is depicted as if capable of intent, and is referenced with the pronoun "she" rather than "it".
• An outstanding example of a quality or idea: "He's invisible, a walking personification of the Negative" (Ralph Ellison).
• An artistic representation of an abstract quality or idea as a person, for example the four cardinal virtues or nine Muses.

== External sources == hi hih hi

• Unknown, . "Personification". Poetry As We See It. 1 June 2003. ThinkQuest. 30 May 2008.

References

1. ^ "What is personification" from SIL International

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