Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics

This article examines the mediating function that transforms the topic presented, usually but not always in the initial position of a text, into the comment, in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Haunted Palace’. In this text, a poem in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, the mediation, which is indicated in parentheses, is realized through various transformational devices, for example, a gradual change of lexical items (e.g. a graphological and voice inversion like _III-2saw – (_III-8was seen) – _IV-2 Was….₆Was). This function mediates the discourse theme, PAST GLORY (EXISTENCE) into the discourse rheme, PRESENT FALL (DESTRUCTION). This short text displays Poe’s exquisite skill in using the poetic devices that were available at that time. Unlike Old English poetry, which was exclusively delivered orally, or medieval poetry, which was circulated in manuscript but transmitted largely through the medium of sound, this 19th century work added several different communicative aspects characteristic of poetry circulated in print following a functional pattern of thematization common to communicative events. Through the discussion of functional arrangements of the traditional and ‘new’ textual devices, Poe’s name is shown to be anagrammatically embedded to mediate the topic of the text, or discourse theme, PAST GLORY (EXISTENCE), and the comment on the topic, or discourse rheme, PRESENT FALL (DESTRUCTION).

This article argues that quantitative verse can be no more than an intellectual exercise in English because of the language’s strong dynamic accent and tendency towards stress-timing. The case focuses on Tennyson’s experiment entitled ‘Hendecasyllabics’, which he described as being ‘in a metre of Catullus’. The article offers a detailed comparison of the supra-segmental features of Tennyson’s poem and its model and concludes that the English poem lacks an essential component of the Latin metre: a variable relationship between ictus and accent. As a result, Tennyson unwittingly composed lines with a regular accentual configuration, one that English poets had been studiously avoiding for 500 years. In contrast, poets of the Southern Romance languages have cultivated this type of line assiduously, and the article pursues the historical reasons for the divergence. It concludes that the difference is almost entirely due to individual aesthetic choices, and that this line structure, known as the endecasílabo melódico, is a viable option as a verse design for English poets.

The present article addresses sociolinguistic issues in a literary context, namely regional variation in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a relevant, though not fully analysed, aspect of this novel. By the end of the 19th century most of Ireland was predominantly English speaking, but taking on a foreign language meant for the Irish a form of exile from their own identity, place and history. Revivalist writers responded to such a tension by using Hiberno-English, until it eventually became established as a literary medium. As is clear from my analysis, dialectal usage powerfully contributes to the vivid realization of most characters in Joyce’s novel, reflecting their regional provenance and social background. The representation of the linguistic situation thus offered is realistic and extensive, but also innovative in the context of the Irish Literary Revival. More importantly, it illustrates the protagonist’s views on national identity, and his struggles to find his own voice in the midst of the polyphony prevalent in turn-of-the-century Dublin. As this article argues, the dialogical tension between hybrid Irish English and standard English is truly essential to a comprehensive reading of A (colonial) Portrait.

Conceptual Integration theorists have recently revised the time is space conceptual metaphor, and proposed a more complex structure of mappings. The result of that network of mappings is a particular event of motion through space, conditioned by its goal to represent time. Coulson and Pagán Cánovas (forthcoming) have studied the timeline as a material anchor for this time-space blend. The timeline facilitates navigation of the time-space blend by presenting temporal relations directly as spatial relations. Through the analysis of Kavafis’ simile of life as a row of candles and Manrique’s metaphor of life as a river, we show that poetic texts can rely on the timeline to build powerful affective meanings.

Internally focalized passages in narrative often employ metaphors to capture the experiential states of the focalizing character. My investigation of these metaphors – ‘phenomenological metaphors’, as I call them – has two important precedents in the fields of narratology and literary stylistics: Dorrit Cohn’s (1978) treatment of ‘psycho-analogies’ and Semino and Swindlehurst’s (1996) approach to metaphor and ‘mind style’. After positioning phenomenological metaphors vis-à-vis these related concepts, I put forward the central claim of this article: metaphorical language plays a role in readers’ engagement with focalizing characters because it can sustain readers’ illusion of experiencing a storyworld through the consciousness of a fictional being. But what is it about metaphorical language that makes it especially suited to bring about this effect on readers? In order to answer this question, I use Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday (2005) as a case study, presenting two different lines of argument. First, I contend that metaphors reflect, at a linguistic level, the seamless integration of perception, emotion and language that characterizes our everyday transactions with the world. Second, I look at the relationship between understanding metaphorical language and readers’ empathy for characters, arguing that the continuity between these psychological processes is grounded in their perspectival nature: just as metaphors invite recipients to adopt a new perspective on a conceptual domain, engaging with a focalizing character encourages readers to ‘try on’ his or her experiential perspective and worldview. Taken together, these hypotheses provide an explanation for the effectiveness of phenomenological metaphors at conveying to readers the qualitative ‘feel’ of characters’ experiences.

This quantitative and qualitative study argues that the One Ring in The Lord of the Rings (LotR) is based on a metaphoric blend, which is echoed in related metaphors for power throughout the trilogy. Particular metaphors may be repeated in a literary work to achieve a stylistic effect (Ben-Porat, 1992; Crisp et al., 2002; Sullivan, 2007; Werth, 1994). This article suggests that the One Ring, and other powers conceptualized as objects, repeatedly test the mettle and morality of characters throughout the LotR trilogy. The current study examines the One Ring as a metaphoric blend (in the sense of Fauconnier, 1997) based on the Object Event-Structure (OES) metaphor, in which abstract goals are conceptualized as physical objects (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999), and compares the structure of this blend with all other OES metaphors for power throughout LotR. The study finds that just as good characters are ‘weighed down’ by the Ring, they feel ‘burdened’ by other forms of power and authority, whereas evil characters do not feel that power is a ‘burden’. Similarly, the manner in which the Ring is acquired is indicative of character quality, a trend shared by other metaphors for power and authority. Finally, the Ring is a non-living object; and throughout the trilogy, other metaphoric ‘objects’ are found to be more likely to be evil, whereas plants and growing things are more likely to map metaphorically onto the forces of good.