On the Essence and Category of ‘Personification’;a Reflection on the Tradition of Literary and Rhetoric Scholars

There have been still divisive opinions among Persian literary and rhetoric scholars until today, as to the essence and category of "personification" as a literary device. Often with a formalistic point of view, some of them hold it as to be a kind of metaphor, and some others as to be outside of the category of metaphor. And they at the same linguistic level deal with its categorical organization and typological classification, which so far has been, as this research shows, a fruitless effort. Thus, the issue of the research is that the essence and the category of "personification" in (at least, Persian) literary and rhetorical tradition is in the aura of ambiguity. This paper is a theoretical query that, with the purpose of better understanding the linguistic-literary phenomenon of "personification", and with a descriptive method and a qualitative way of reasoning, introduces and then criticizes the opinions of several contemporaries in the field of poetry, and tries to lay a logical basis for explaining the nature of this phenomenon from a scientific point of view and to show some other aspects of its reality. The emphasis on the nature and the function of personification has brought evidence from the field of Iranian miniature.