摘要：The paper presents the literary character as a spatial entity, having as a starting point simon varey’s study space and the eighteenth-century novel. Our aim is to show that we can learn about a human being’s personality features, designs, interests, plans, mental or emotional states not only by focusing on that person’s behaviour, language or gestures, but also by analysing his/ her external appearance. In fact, it is the exploitation of the ‘man is a building’ theory, according to which humans could be architecturally invested with (or, better said, analyzed from an architectural point of view) features and concepts generally associated to natural or artificial spaces (like gardens, rooms, buildings, cities, etc.) Studying the 18th century literature we observed that henry fielding characterised his characters as spaces, using language referring to architectural elements. Additionally, by emphasizing the external aspects of the characters, the author subtly points to their inner characteristics.
