ABSTRACT

What is distinctive about literary metaphors? Why do authors use metaphors in literature? In principle, metaphors in literature don’t differ in kind from metaphors in other contexts. On the one hand, we encounter many relatively prosaic metaphors within fiction, of the sort you might hear in ordinary conversation, for the unsurprising reason that the fiction aims to present something that might be an ordinary conversation. On the other hand, we also encounter ‘poetic’ metaphors in real life, for instance in political speeches and history books. Metaphors form a continuum from the prosaic to the poetic—or better, they are arrayed along multiple dimensions which conspire to produce that continuum. These dimensions include, but are not limited to, how much sustained attention a given metaphor warrants in context, how imagistic and emotionally laden its effects are, and how novel, rich and open-ended it is.