Characters' Names in the Shade of Literary Tendencies: An Onomastic Approach to Characters' Names in The Mayor of Casterbridge, A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, and The City of Glass

Abstract

Abstract Literary schools are devised to categorize different writers' styles and visions in creating a literary piece of work. Writers tend to project their views by using a vast range of lingual tools. This article takes a specific look at the choice of characters' names by three different writers from three different literary schools, namely, Naturalism, Modernism, and Postmodernism. As designated sets of literary characteristics are traceable in a piece belonging to a certain literary school, one of the ways in which a writer boosts the paradigm is the choice of names for their characters. Three novels are our concern: The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy (a Naturalist), A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce (a Modernist), and The City of Glass by Paul Auster (a Postmodernist). The method of investigating the importance of names encompasses linguistic, morphological, and etymological factors (Online Etymology Dictionary). Since these writers adhere to the restrictions of these three literary schools, the characters' names are picked to highlight the same regulations to emphasize their literary potency.