Literary Names: Personal Names in English Literature - Hardcover

An amusing, accessible book this volume merits a wide readership: specialists will hasten to pore over Fowler's comments on Paradise Lost or Lolita or on the characters' names in Twelfth Night, while the experienced reader will browse the book as a whole with recurring smiles of delight and gasps of edification. (E.D. Hill, Choice)

this book is something of a marvel. (London Review of Books)

Fowler ― now in his eighties ― has more learning between his ears than most of us could acquire in eight lifetimes ... [his] book has the inspirational virtue that it makes one think one's own thoughts. (John Sutherland, Literary Review)

[an] engagingly and sometimes overflowingly serendipitous book ... lively and informative ... generally delightful (Claude Rawson, Times Literary Supplement)

Unusually for a scholar of such deep erudition, Fowler appears to have either the modesty or common sense to follow Frank Kermode's precept: "Names can have power, but not always." (Alexandra Mullen, The New Criterion)

Why do authors use pseudonyms and pen-names, or ingeniously hide names in their work with acrostics and anagrams? How has the range of permissible given names changed and how is this reflected in literature? Why do some characters remain mysteriously nameless? In this rich and learned book, Alastair Fowler explores the use of names in literature of all periods - primarily English but also Latin, Greek, French, and Italian - casting an unusual and rewarding light on the work of literature itself. He traces the history of names through Homer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Thackeray, Dickens, Joyce, and Nabokov, showing how names often turn out to be the thematic focus. Fowler shows that the associations of names, at first limited, become increasingly salient and sophisticated as literature itself develops.