Thanks to those of you who have, amazingly enough, already responded. But
isn't there a more specific term than "pathetic fallacy"? I'm thinking of
a more condensed figure of speech in which, instead of a speaker's
imagining the external world responding to his or her emotions in kind, an
adjective signifying emotion is simply applied to an inanimate object
rather than to the human subject. The knights who leap out of their roused
beds when they hear Malecasta's shrieks aren't mooning around like
Petrarchan lovers, imagining that their beds are sympathizing with them.
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