THE PSYCHOLOGICAL REALISM OF FICTIONAL CHARACTERS: Another Perspective

In a number of recent studies of the characters in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, there has been a reappearance of an old critical ghost — the attribution of psychological realism to fictional characters. The unfortunate effect of this has been to divert the critic from his proper task, the analysis of the functioning of the verbal constructs constituting the text, to fruitless speculation about the unknown and unknowable psychosexual history of fictional characters. As a critical practice, such an activity is highly problematic from both a logical and a literary critical point of view.