Denis Donoghue has taught English, Irish, and American Literature at University College, Dublin; Cambridge University and King’s College, Cambridge; and New York University.
For almost half a century Denis Donoghue has written stylish,
weighty books, distinguished by the way they interweave an
intricate sense of literary pleasure with an interest, no less
intricate, in philosophical ideas… Now we have Metaphor, a
characteristically intelligent and suggestive account, which
reconsiders these grand philosophical tensions on the small stage
of a figure of speech… Metaphor becomes an index of spiritual
freedom: not a bit of tame likeness-making, like a simile. A
metaphor is more like a heroic gesture towards autonomy, a
rejection of the world of ‘common usage and the values it
enforces.’ Donoghue pursues this theme with all his urbane powers
of implication and range, finding in the metaphor a miniaturized
instance of the idealist imagination… Donoghue is vivid and clever
about a whole range of metaphorical uses in these pages.
*Times Literary Supplement*
[A] civilized and informative book… When he discusses Yeats, Joyce
or Heaney, Donoghue doesn’t just understand their language but
feels it too, and the whole book explains through close analysis of
poems by Pound, Stevens and Eliot why image and metaphor have come
to occupy such a central position in modernist poetry and
20th-century criticism.
*London Review of Books*
[There is a] difference between metaphor that illuminates and
metaphor that obscures. It is one of the merits of Denis Donoghue’s
book, with its rich store of examples and its intimacy with the
secondary literature, that he is constantly inciting us to wrestle
with that distinction.
*New Criterion*
You think you know what a metaphor is, but you don’t, not really.
Denis Donoghue’s new book, Metaphor, is here to help, tracing the
genealogy of the metaphor—along with its siblings, like the
simile—throughout history, offering a more complete understanding
of this ubiquitous literary device… Chock-full of entertaining
examples and informative lessons on all types of metaphor.
*Sewanee Review*
Let us be clear: this is one of the more important books written by
an Irish author so far this century… [Donoghue’s] magnum opus.
*The Furrow*
[A] subtle and engrossing new book… Full of wild and beautiful
examples.
*Irish Times*
Compelling… [It] meanders gently from the charmingly personal to
the keenly microscopic in its treatment of its (largely literary
and philosophical) material… A true readerly pleasure in Metaphor
is the intense, tactile connection Donoghue strikes between himself
and the text at hand… This is the purpose of Metaphor: to make us
see how and why metaphor can revitalize our understanding not just
of what we read but of how we read… What [Donoghue] succeeds at
doing is to force us to scrutinize with greater care, to convince
us to bring a portion of ourselves to what we read, and to get us
to think outside the (metaphorical) box to which our everyday
associations has confined us. Making metaphor personal is the key
to eliciting deeper reading.
*Open Letters Monthly*
Wonderfully combines the scholarly and the personal. Recalling his
metaphor-rich Catholic childhood and hearing ‘Panis Angelicus,’
[Donoghue] unlocks Aquinas’ word-play to elucidate the view that
divinity conceals itself in physical symbols. He forces us to
reconsider ordinary language, what makes (or doesn’t) make one
thing like another and ultimately what truth and reality actually
are.
*The Tablet*
In this prodigiously learned meditation, Donoghue takes readers
through the history of the rhetorical device and its incarnations
in poetry, fiction, philosophy, and everyday life… Rummaging
through an exhaustive collection of linguistic authorities from
Aristotle and Aquinas to Vico, Paul de Man, and J. L. Austin,
Donoghue analyzes conflicting accounts of how metaphor shapes
language and our experience of reality… Donoghue strives to show
how metaphors ‘offer to change the world by changing one’s sense of
it.’ Along the way, he studies verse by Shakespeare, Milton, Keats,
and Stevens, among many others, weaving a thick tapestry of
examples to show how metaphors are used and abused… The book
successfully plunges readers into the complexities of figurative
language and its power to revivify experience.
*Publishers Weekly*
Donoghue’s gentle, appreciative reflection on literary language
here comes with the wisdom of accumulated decades of wide reading
and robust insight. This is a book all about imaginative life, and
it is a celebration of such life par excellence. It is a treat to
watch a far-ranging, first-rate mind range over poetry and prose of
centuries with so much zest for more life.
*Leslie Brisman, author of Romantic Origins*
A wide-ranging, deeply learned account of the ‘daring vivacities’
language can achieve from the man who wrote the book on
eloquence.
*Denise Gigante, author of Life: Organic Form and
Romanticism*
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