Personality
Definition
In psychology, personality refers to the emotion, thought, and behavior patterns unique to an individual. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality [Jul 2004]Character
Related: actor - actress - fiction -
List of characters: archetype - hero - incubus - father - femme fatale - man - monster - mother - Pan - succubus - stereotype - victim - villain - woman
A fictional character is any person who appears in a work of fiction. More accurately, a fictional character is the person or conscious entity we imagine to exist within the world of such a work. In addition to people, characters can be aliens, animals, gods or, occasionally, inanimate objects. Characters are almost always at the center of fictional texts, especially novels and plays. It is, in fact, hard to imagine a novel or play without characters, though such texts have been attempted (James Joyce's Finnegans Wake is one of the most famous examples). In poetry, there is almost always some sort of person present, but often only in the form of a narrator or an imagined listener.
In various forms of theatre, performance arts and cinema (except for animation and CGI movies), fictional characters are performed by actors, dancers and singers. In animations and puppetry, they are voiced by voice actors, though there have been several examples, particularly, in machinima, where characters are voiced by computer generated voices. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictional_character [Apr 2005]
Stock character
A stock character is a fictional character that relies heavily on cultural types or stereotypes for its personality, manner of speech, and other characteristics. Stock characters are instantly recognizable to members of a given culture. Because of this, a frequent device of both comedy and parody is to wildly exaggerate the expected mannerisms of stock characters.Stock characters in the western tradition originate from the theatres of ancient Greece and Rome, and, somewhat more recently, from the Italian Commedia Dell'arte.
In the United States, courts have determined that copyright protection can not be extended to the characteristics of stock characters in a story, whether it be a book, play, or film. Nichols v. Universal Pictures Corporation, 45 F.2d 119 (2d Cir. 1930). --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_character [Apr 2005]
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