The Interpretation of Fictional Characters in Literary Texts: History of Literary Criticism, Philosophy and Formal Ontologies

This reprint of the Special Issue of the journal Humanities, titled ‘The Interpretation of Fictional Characters in Literary Texts: History of Literary Criticism, Philosophy and Formal Ontologies’, features 18 international articles on several Issues pertaining to fictional characters and interpretation, spanning from the history of literary criticism to philosophy and formal ontologies. Our goal is to shed light on the following topics: 1. The different theories, methodologies, and critical tools adopted by literary critics and scholars when it comes to interpreting fictional characters, and, namely, their specific vocabularies, argumentative strategies, and their relationship with the previous analysis; 2. Philosophical discussions concerning the nature of fictional characters, encompassing novel perspectives on their existence and identity conditions. These include, but are not limited to, insights into their correlation with authors' intentions, readers' responses, and other associated dimensions; 3. Conceptual and formal models, possibly expressed in formal languages used in applied ontology (such as first-order logic, description logics, and Semantic Web languages) that are designed to provide scholars with conceptual and digital tools for documenting, analyzing, and comparing multiple sets of interpretive data.