Ovid's shadow: Character and characterization in early modern literature

Imagine a future world. A future world, if motivated and consistent, cannot be simple to imagine. Its inhabitants must be at once distinct from those belonging to a present or past world, but still thinkable. However different, they will have to fulfil certain coherence criteria in order to be seen "as a totality, a coherent whole." Even a future world must situate itself along a "continuum of the possible, the highly likely, the wildly improbable and the downright impossible" (Maitre 29, 17). The inhabitants o f such a future world are characters: they have traits, a range of actions, a kind of coherence, an illusion of being (more or less powerful), but they are non-existent. Imagining a future world seems rather like trying to focus a fictional world in the mind's-eye. Here is a possible future world. Imagine animals only. The human race may, or may not, have died out, but its presence is not important to this exercise. What will those animals look like? The world itself will have changed, colder or hotter, wetter or drier, and thus the niches available for life will be different. Now you must bring to this exercise your (imprecise) knowledge of Darwinian biology. You need only remember that life adapts to changing circumstances and seeks ecological niches to exploit and within which to survive. Now imagine the possible animals of the great Australian rain forest. (The continent's climate, and its corresponding ecological niches, will have radically changed.) Perhaps you can see the giantala, Silfrangerus giganteus, whose