Personification

Personification is "the representation of any thing, being, or abstraction as a person or with person-like qualities." The article keeps it distinct from anthropomorphism, "the attribution of human traits, emotions, or intentions to non-human entities": personification turns the thing into a person. Its subjects run from cities and countries to the seasons, the elements, death, the virtues and the vices. Rhetoric studied it early: Demetrius of Phalerum, around 300 BC, was "the first writer on rhetoric to describe prosopopoeia," and literature built whole allegories from it, Prudentius's battling virtues, Boethius's Lady Philosophy, Piers Plowman and The Pilgrim's Progress.

For novelists it remains the standing invitation of prose: weather that threatens, a house that waits, memory that knocks. One such transferred image is a metaphor doing personification work, and a story system built out of such figures hardens into allegory.