Evaluation of Metaphor in Literature

Abstract

For teachers who work with literature, it is important to know whether their students actually value doing this work and if so, what they value it for. In literary theory it has been argued that foregrounding plays a central role in evaluation, and empirical research in support of this relationship was reviewed in Chapter 2. Studies by both van Peer (1986) and by Miall and Kuiken (1994) provide good evidence that foregrounding affects the evaluations of L1 readers in the predicted manner, but there is virtually no research on how it affects L2 evaluations. The present chapter investigates L2 evaluation of literature against this background.