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This article considers Piers Plowman’s construction of personifications in light of New Materialism, arguing that the poem is particularly receptive to the ways in which matter plays on language even as language seeks to contain and police the material world. Specifically, it argues that personification involves an inversion of animacy hierarchies (the assignation of relative liveness, sentience, or humanness to objects in the material world that has an effect both on how these objects are interpreted in the world and on how they operate as grammatical constructs). By placing abstract concepts in human bodies, Piers Plowman creates a momentary poetic inversion of animacy hierarchies; personification can be thought of as a material act.
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