Description
Book SynopsisEmerson's Metaphors is a fundamental reinterpretation of the major American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson and an interdisciplinary intervention in literary criticism. This book draws on the methods and conclusions of the paradigm shifting Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), which recognizes that metaphor is a cognitive form rather than a rhetorical or ornamental feature. Closely reading Emerson's journals, lectures and reassessing the major essays, Emerson's Metaphors demonstrates that Emerson's prose 'thinks' through its figurative language, enabling the vital symbolic reconceptualizations of nature, man and God that would prove so crucial for the emergence of American literature. This monograph does not just have implications for Emerson scholarship, but as the first full-length study of a canonical writer to use CMT, it provides a model for the interpretation of all literary works.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction: Fossil Poetry
Part 1: Emerson’s Theory of Metaphor
Chapter One: ‘A Golden Link’: Emerson’s Doctrine of Correspondence
Chapter Two: ‘Apposite Metaphors’: Analogy and Symbolism
Chapter Three: Leaving me my Eyes: Nature’s Embodied Theory of Metaphor
Part 2: Emerson’s Practice of Metaphor
Chapter Four: Nature
Chapter Five: Humankind
Chapter Six: God
Conclusion
Bibliography
About the Author
