The everyman is a stock character of fiction. An ordinary and humble character, [3] [4] the everyman is generally a protagonist whose benign conduct fosters the audience's identification with them.
The term everyman was used as early as an English morality play from the early 1500s: The Summoning ofEveryman. [4] The play's protagonist is an allegorical character representing an ordinary human who knows he is soon to die; according to literature scholar Harry Keyishian he is portrayed as "prosperous, gregarious, [and] attractive". [6] Everyman is the only human character of the play; the others are embodied ideas such as Fellowship, who "symbolizes the transience and limitations of human friendship". [6]
The use of the term everyman to refer generically to a portrayal of an ordinary or typical person dates to the early 20th century. [7] The term everywoman [8] originates in the same period, having been used by George Bernard Shaw to describe the character Ann Whitefield of his play Man and Superman . [9]
An everyman is described with the intent that most audience members can readily identify with him. Although the everyman may face the same difficulties that a hero might, archetypal heroes react rapidly and vigorously by manifest action, whereas an everyman typically avoids engagement or reacts ambivalently, until the situation, growing dire, demands effective reaction to avert disaster. Such a "round", dynamic character—that is, a character showing complexity and development—is generally a protagonist. [10]
Or if lacking complexity and development—thus a "flat", static character—then the everyman is a secondary character.[ citation needed ] Especially in literature, there is often a narrator, as the written medium enables extensive explication of, for example, previous events, internal details, and mental content. An everyman narrator may be noticed little, whether by other characters or sometimes even by the reader. A narrating everyman, like Ché in the musical Evita , [11] [12] may even address the audience directly.[ citation needed ]
This section possibly contains original research .(November 2024) |
Big Brother is a character and symbol in George Orwell's dystopian 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. He is ostensibly the leader of Oceania, a totalitarian state wherein the ruling party, Ingsoc, wields total power "for its own sake" over the inhabitants.
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A first-person narrative is a mode of storytelling in which a storyteller recounts events from that storyteller's own personal point of view, using first-person grammar such as "I", "me", "my", and "myself". It must be narrated by a first-person character, such as a protagonist, re-teller, witness, or peripheral character. Alternatively, in a visual storytelling medium, the first-person perspective is a graphical perspective rendered through a character's visual field, so the camera is "seeing" out of a character's eyes.
Coming Up for Air is the seventh book and fourth novel by the English writer George Orwell, published in June 1939 by Victor Gollancz. It was written between 1938 and 1939 while Orwell spent time recuperating from illness in French Morocco, mainly in Marrakesh. He delivered the completed manuscript to Victor Gollancz upon his return to London in March 1939.
Leopold Bloom is the fictional protagonist and hero of James Joyce's 1922 novel Ulysses. His peregrinations and encounters in Dublin on 16 June 1904 mirror, on a more mundane and intimate scale, those of Ulysses/Odysseus in Homer's epic poem: The Odyssey.
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Thriller is a genre of fiction with numerous, often overlapping, subgenres, including crime, horror, and detective fiction. Thrillers are characterized and defined by the moods they elicit, giving their audiences heightened feelings of suspense, excitement, surprise, anticipation and anxiety. This genre is well suited to film and television.
The man on the Clapham omnibus is a hypothetical ordinary and reasonable person, used by the courts in English law where it is necessary to decide whether a party has acted as a reasonable person would – for example, in a civil action for negligence. The character is a reasonably educated, intelligent but nondescript person, against whom the defendant's conduct can be measured.
A Wild Sheep Chase is the third novel by Japanese author Haruki Murakami. First published in Japan in 1982, it was translated into English in 1989. It is an independent sequel to Pinball, 1973, and the third book in the so-called "Trilogy of the Rat". It won the 1982 Noma Literary Newcomer's Prize.
Everyman is a stock character in drama, originally appearing in mediaeval morality plays.
The Unnamable is a 1953 novel by Samuel Beckett. It was originally published in French as L'Innommable and later translated by the author into English. Grove Press published the English edition in 1958.
Everyman is a novel by Philip Roth, published by Houghton Mifflin in May 2006. It won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2007. It is Roth's third novel to receive the prize.
Marina Lewycka is a British novelist of Ukrainian origin.
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A reader model is the term used for the hypothetical average person who is the target audience for a product. A reader model can be made from the average behaviour of many product users by datamining things like loyalty cards. Based on data collected from datamining, an 'ordinary individual' (everyman) can be constructed (modeled) to develop the best strategy for selling to consumers. Reader models are used by corporations to direct consumer behaviour to their products. Marketing, advertising, and product placement use reader models as a central part of their planning and source the reader model by using focus groups. In plain language a reader model is used by corporations to predict who will buy the better mousetrap. The 'everyman' is used by commercial musicians, writers, and the movie industry trying to make money from a product that will appeal to a mass audience. These industries use the reader model to try to gauge and predict the consumer market in an effort to create and profit from a hit single, best seller, or a box office hit movie. A well-known example is the success of Jaws (novel), the film, and the theme music.
"Oh What a Circus" is a song from the 1976 musical Evita, which had lyrics by Tim Rice and music by Andrew Lloyd Webber. It was recorded by English singer David Essex and released as a single on August 19, 1978, by Mercury Records. Essex played the character of Che in the original London production of the musical, and the song is sung from his point-of-view. Produced and arranged by Mike Batt, "Oh What a Circus" is a mid-tempo song, comparing the musical's title character Eva Perón's funeral with a circus, and calling her actions fraudulent. The song is a contrafactum, and shares its tune with the better known "Don't Cry for Me Argentina" from the same show.
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Citizen X or CitizenX may refer to: