Metaphor, Animals, Modernism

“Metaphor, Animals, Modernism offers a powerful rethinking of what it means to respond to literature in the wake of the animal turn. Trejling restores to metaphor its ethical and imaginative force, and shows how we can read more responsibly, with greater attentiveness and vulnerability towards the haunting strangeness of language, which is to say its literarity—or rather, though perhaps it amounts to the same thing, its animality.” 



—Kári Driscoll, Department of Languages, Literature and Communication, Utrecht University, Netherlands 



“Metaphor, Animals, Modernism rightly calls literary animal studies scholars to a new humility, and a new lucidity, about the metaphorical and its relation to animals. Providing a much-needed and compelling corrective to critical anxieties around animal metaphors, this study unfastens the plenitudes within metaphor and its haunting significations. Demonstrating just how untamed and teeming animal metaphors really are, Metaphor, Animals, Modernism deftly reminds readers and theorists of the lavish intricacies of metaphoricity, and thereby opens countless new paths for further work in animal studies.” 



—Carrie Rohman, Department of English, Lafayette College, USA 






Metaphor is of vital concern to the discipline of literary studies as well as the field of animal studies. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s philosophy and Paul Ricœur’s tropology, this book studies the spectrality of metaphor in relation to animal figures in D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow, H.D.’s Asphodel, and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. The analyses show that metaphor and animals alike can invite literarity—a textual hospitality toward otherness—into a work. In this, Trejling confronts the notion of metaphor as substitutional—a metaphysical idea prevalent in animal studies and the posthumanities. In challenging this perception, Metaphor, Animals, Modernism demonstrates that the spectrality of metaphor can make literature a site where readers can encounter a creature—not to name, tame, or train it, but to speak to it, and to await its response. 



Maria Trejling is Postdoctoral Fellow at Halmstad University, Sweden. Her research explores the modes of reading demanded by literature. She received her PhD from Stockholm University, Sweden, with a dissertation awarded by the Swedish Academy as a laudable work in Literary Studies.