English, Department of
Date of this Version
January 1917
Abstract
An extensive examination of the names of characters in the works of the majority of nineteenth and twentieth century novelists would obviously be of little value, for the growing tendency toward the commonplace in realism has necessitated the selection of neutral names or names taken outright from actual persons. Though few of the characters in recent fiction are so handicapped by inappropriate names as are many people in real life,-where, to quote a modern poet, "surnames ever go by contraries"-still, with the contemporary novelists, there is usually nothing in a name to denote an intimate correspondence between it and the character to which it belongs. It may be that the aversion to the grotesque or the descriptive in nomenclature springs from a conviction that the liking for peculiar names is obsolete, and that it has passed from the world of letters, as the brilliantly flowered waistcoat from the pages of fashion; or it may be that it is merely an illustration of loss of caste by a literary mode, which appears in succeeding generations in varying degrees of degradation.
Comments
UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA STUDIES IN LANGUAGE, LITERATURE, AND CRITICISM Number I
Lincoln, Nebraska 1917