'This issue of Southerly was conceived both a general topic that would attract a wide range of submissions and to reflect the return of the'character' to the fore of literary scholarship in the last decade. This return to character is taken up in John Frow's study Character and Person (Oxford : OUP, 2014) which details the fundamental 'problem that fictional characters are made of words, of images, of imaginings, and not real in the way that people are real : but that we endow these sketched- in figures with some semblance of reality which moves' (online Chs 1, 2). Each chapter of Frow's monograph focuses on a figuration - and considers how these strategies work together to affect the reader's sympathy, interest and judgement.' (Editorial)