Emerson's Metaphors [Hardcover]

Emerson'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.David Greenham is professor of English literature at the University of the West of England, UK.

A compelling analysis of metaphor not just as a figure in the text of Emersons philosophy but as material to its very thinking and writing. Greenham delineates a generative, conceptual map for rereading Emersons mind at work in the metaphors on the page. Sean Ross Meehan, Washington College and author of A Liberal Education in Late Emerson: Readings in the Rhetoric of Mind

Emersons Metaphors is a brilliant exposition of how consideration of the cognitive workings of a poets minding can illuminate and expand a conceptual theory of metaphor while at the same time revealing metaphor as the empirical basis of all human thought and language. Dr. Greenham traces in careful, comprehensive, and meticulous detail the emerging development of Emersons metaphorical thinking through his readings and experience of Natural History in creating a concept of identity relating nature, humankind, and God. Margaret H. Freeman, Myrifield Institute for Cognition and the Arts

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