Abstract
This chapter introduces metaphor as a central feature of literature and as a communicative phenomenon more generally, in light of the relevance theory account of communication developed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson. The structure of the rest of the book is outlined: Chapter 2 considers the notion of relevance as a literary critical concern, and introduces relevance theory; Chapter 3 surveys the history of and significant developments within metaphor studies; and the second part of the book consists of chapters on three poets in relation to three key features of relevance theory's account of communication:Emily Dickinson and inference, Elizabeth Bishop and implicature, and Seamus Heaney and mutual manifestness.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Albright, Daniel. 2006. Yeats and Modernism. In The Cambridge Companion to W. B. Yeats, ed. Marjorie Howes and John Kelly, 59–76. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Attridge, Derek. 1996. Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics in Retrospect. In Weber 1996, 36–53.
Cave, Terence. 2016. Thinking with Literature: Towards a Cognitive Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cave, Terence, and Deirdre Wilson, eds. 2018. Reading Beyond the Code. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Chesters, Tim. 2018. The Lingering of the Literal in Some Poems of Emily Dickinson. In Cave and Wilson 2018, 148–63.
Donoghue, Denis. 2014. Metaphor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Fish, Stanley. 1996. What Is Stylistics and Why Are They Saying Such Terrible Things About It? In Weber 1996, 94–116.
Green, Keith. 1997. Butterflies, Wheels and the Search for Literary Relevance. Language and Literature 6 (2): 133–38.
Heaney, Seamus. 1988. The Government of the Tongue. London: Faber and Faber.
———. 1995. The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures. London: Faber and Faber.
———. 1998. Crediting Poetry. In Opened Ground: Poems 1966–1996, 447–67. London: Faber and Faber.
Jakobson, Roman. (1958) 1996. Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics. In Weber 1996, 10–35.
Pilkington, Adrian. 2000. Poetic Effects: A Relevance Theory Perspective. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson. 1995. Relevance: Communication and Cognition, 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell.
———. 2012. Meaning and Relevance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Toolan, Michael. 2018. Stylistics. In A Companion to Literary Theory, ed. David H. Richter. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell.
Toolan, Michael. 2018. Stylistics. In Richter 2018, 60–71.
Weber, Jean Jacques, ed. 1996. The Stylistics Reader. London: Arnold.
Williams, Wes. 2018. Invisible Guests’: Shared Contexts, Inference and Poetic Truth in Heaney’s ‘Album V’. In Cave and Wilson 2018, 111–25.
Wilson, Deirdre. 2018. Relevance Theory and Literary Interpretation. In Cave and Wilson 2018, 185–204.
Yeats, W.B. 1990. The Poems, ed. Daniel Albright. London: Dent.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
O’Donoghue, J. (2021). Introduction: Communicating Metaphor. In: The Relevance of Metaphor. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83954-3_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83954-3_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-83953-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-83954-3
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)