Department of English

This thesis attempts to investigate the role and qualities of the authorial figure in written works of semi-fictionality. The first chapter examines Francesco Petrarch’s Secretum and his employment of the figures of Franciscus and Augustinus, representative of himself and St. Augustine, to suggest the necessity of separating the identity of the real-world men from their in-text counterparts. This separation and its implications are further explored in the second chapter, which focuses on Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, The Canterbury Tales, and the Retraction, to read further the ontological qualities and independent agency that must be extended to these written figures who, in the microcosms of their texts, hold the highest authority. The final chapter reads into the blending of reality and fiction through Sir Philip Sidney’s self-figure of Astrophil in his Astrophil and Stella. The aim here is to position Sidney as author and Astrophil as textual authority alongside each other, where this project reasons in favor of reading Astrophil’s existence as an authorial persona, mimetic of but not identical to the true Sidney. The overall argument presented in this thesis is to nuance the hermeneutic approach to figures of semi-fictionality and enable these personae with human qualities of interiority.