Literary Metaphor Research Articles

RECENSIONI: Literary Diseases, Theme and Metaphor in the Italian Novel

RECENSIONI: Literary Diseases, Theme and Metaphor in the Italian Novel

Symbols and Metaphors in Literature and Representations of Private Life

Symbols and Metaphors in Literature and Representations of Private Life

The Novels of Ken Kesey

In their manual based upon The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Richard Alpert, Ralph Metzner and Timothy Leary discuss the signs of the ‘Third Bardo’ existence in a psychedelic experience in the vocabulary of Ken Kesey's fiction:Where Tibetans saw demons and beasts of prey, a Westerner may see impersonal machinery grinding, or depersonalizing and controlling devices of different futuristic varieties. Visions of world destruction and hallucinations of being engulfed by destructive powers, and sounds of the mind-controlling apparatus of the ‘combine's fog machinery’, of the gears which move.In his two novels, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes A Great Notion, Kesey has described that sense of the disintegration and death and ultimate rebirth of the ego which lies at the heart of the LSD ‘trip’. Both books are literary metaphors for psychedelic experiences.

Pierrot: A Critical History of a Mask

Robert Storey's lively and gracefully written study of Pierrot is the first scholarly history of this fascinating popular figure. Unlike previous studies of commedia dell'arte characters; this book focuses as much on Pierrot as a literary metaphor and mask as on the roles and dimensions of his stage character. Originally published in 1978. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Iconography on the Nature and Inspiration of Poetry in Renaissance Emblem Literature

When Thoughts and prejudices become stereotyped, they seek the fixed expression and convenient reference of a visual symbol. The Renaissance, with its Christian, classic, and neo-Platonic imageries, afforded an excellent demonstration of this. During that period, which enlarged consciously and unconsciously the implications of ut pictura poesis, this imagery could be examined in either the poetry or the painting. Nowhere does one find, however, a more harmonious marriage of artistic and literary metaphor than in the innumerable and popular emblem books of the Renaissance, depositories, as Henri Stegemeier writes, of so many traditions, themes, and opinions both belletristic and bellartistic. These emblemata were the perpetuating vehicles by which neoclassic metaphor was brought to the thousands of Europeans whose only contact with the painting of their time was an occasional glance at the religious figures over the candlelight of their local basilica and whose contact with literature was the sporadic reading of racy novelle or those antecedents of the novels which the Renaissance lumped under the term of “heroic poem.” Everyone read the emblem books, or looked at them, and there were more editions of Alciati in the sixteenth century than there were of Rabelais.

‘Flowering Rifle’

To the Editor of Blackfriars.Sir,—I must resolutely disregard the red herrings drawn across my path by the correspondents who give such a sinister reading of my notice of Roy Campbell’s Flowering Rifle. I criticised the book only on literary grounds, and mentioned that works like Auden’s Spain and Spender’s Vienna were also poor art because of their excessive political preoccupations; and because I reject inferior Leftist art along with Rightist work, I apparently suggest that the Rightist writer is Leftist. A remarkable piece of reasoning to come from a great theological college.It is precisely on literary grounds that the critics neglect to base their criticism. The book is lyrical invective at best, and in trying to make an epic of it, the poet has executed a mechanical exercise, which oftenest sounds like a brass band at its brassiest repeating ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ ad nauseam. The language of the less prosy parts is worn-out ‘poetical’ currency like ‘golden,’ ‘scarlet,’ ‘silver,’ ‘storm-red,’ while often the faded literary metaphors of ‘rhyme,’ etc., are used to jolt the poem into life. The author himself says the poem is not meant to emulate people like Claudel, and we can easily agree when we read such bathos as :‘Toledo, here, against the morning sky Like some great battle-cruiser from the fight Returned with Victory (terrific sight I)’—the capitals being used to galvanise the cliche into some shadow of life. But above all, the epic lacks the structure of an epic, and is largely a broken record of literary quarrels.