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“... is a book, as its author says, about ‘how living persons get rendered into literary form’. Alex Woloch himself notes that literary theory has always been unhappy with the idea of ‘character’. He quotes, with I think unintended comic effect, the wonderfully solemn perplexity of Mieke Bal in Narratology (1985), faced by this troubling illusion ...”

“... different proposition, as its 61 pages of industrial-strength endnotes make abundantly clear. Alex Woloch’s purpose is to remedy the relative neglect visited on an ‘iconic political writer’ by ‘literary theory and criticism’ – despite, or perhaps because of, their increasing preoccupation with politics. Whereas Sutherland prefers to stay ...”

“... many ‘actants’ occupying six invariant positions in any given tale. ‘For a long time now,’ Alex Woloch writes in The One v. the Many, ‘characterisation has been the bête noire of narratology, provoking either cursory dismissal, lingering uncertainty or vociferous argument.’ Continuing poststructuralist and ongoing scientistic trends in ...”

“... as a name. In other words, the ‘character-space’ of the two works, to use the term coined by Alex Woloch in his pioneering study of the relationship between major and minor figures in the novel, The One v. the Many, is quite distinct. Powell’s is demographically much richer. If we reckon that, fictionally speaking, the critical measure is not the ...”