Magic Names: Onomastics in the Fantasies of Ursula Le Guin

Abstract

Names in literature have long been studied.Literary onomastics is, indeed, one of the major branches of name study.If any proof of that fact is needed, one need only look at the program of the 1981 annual meeting of the American Name Society, in which two-fifths of the papers were devoted to names in literature, or to the annual Conference on Literary Onomastics and Literary Onomastics Studies arranged by Grace Alvarez-Altman, or to The Study of Names in Literature: A Bibliography, by Elizabeth M. Rajec.Most literary onomastic studies have been devoted to charactonyms.The term charactonym seems not to be entered in any general dictionary so far, although it has been current among students of names for some time.It was apparently invented by Thomas Elliott Berry, who proposed the term in a note in Word Study in 1949.Kelsie Harder helped to popularize it with his study of Faulkner's novels.It has since beel) much used; half a dozen items in the Rajec bibliography have charactonym in their titles, and doubtless a good many others do in their texts.Berry defined the term simply as a "trait name," that is, a name somehow appropriate to a character.My impression is that it is usually pronounced with first-syllable stress, although I heard it given stress on the second syllable in a paper read at the American Dialect Society's annual meeting in 1973.It is sometimes spelt characternym and has such synonyms as label name, attributive name, and characterizing name.Although there have been many studies of particular charactonyms in various works of literature, the charactonym itself has not received much attention.That is, the theory of literary naming has been relatively neglected.(There have been studies by Gerus-Tarn'lwecky, Nicolaisen, and Rudnyckyj, among others.)Yet how an author invents appropriate names is worth more attention than it has received.The ways of name making are manifold; there are too many possibilities to cover easily, so here the focus is on just two extreme kinds of charactonyms, extreme in terms of American Name

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 15 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.