routledge+history+of+literature+in+english

Forster, Conrad and Ford
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style from the metaphoric to the metonymic back and forth through the
twentieth century, in prose and poetry and drama.
In the first passage above, from Bleak House, the key description
occurs at the end of the passage. What is striking is Dickens’s use of
metaphor, particularly in the final sentence of this first paragraph,
where references to money amplify the description by adding this
new element. London is the capital city and at that time the world city
of capital. By equating references to money (‘accumulating’, ‘deposits’,
‘compound interest’) with mud and dirt, Dickens employs a poetic
metaphor indirectly and critically to suggest the ways in which capital
may have contributed to London’s growth. The pervasive trope is
metaphor and the passage accordingly takes on symbolic, poetic, and
non-realistic modes of representation. Using a metaphor involves
substituting one thing for another in a context and requires the reader
to interpret what the substitution stands for or implies in that context.
In the second passage above, from A Passage to India, the basic descriptive
style is metonymic. Metonymy involves a shift from one element in a
sequence to another or from one element in a context to another. Parts,
aspects, and contextual details of things are used by the writer to evoke a
whole context. Thus, reference to the sight of ‘sails’ on the horizon is taken
metonymically to refer to ships; we refer to a ‘cup’ of something when we
refer to its contents or to ‘turf ’ when we refer to horse-racing. Like metaphor,
metonymy requires a context and we work out meanings by referring one
element in the context to another element in the context. Lodge argues that
this is one of the principal ways in which realism operates.
In the opening to A Passage to India, one key sentence is:
The very wood seems made of mud, the inhabitants of mud moving.
The description works here not so much symbolically as by reference
to real mud of which the inhabitants of Chandrapore are literally a
part. Chandrapore itself is presented through one selected aspect; it is
not, as in the case of London in Bleak House, obliquely and indirectly
presented in terms of poetic images of capital and prehistoric monsters.
Paradoxically, in the case of these passages, the nineteenth-century
novel is in metaphoric and the twentieth-century novel in metonymic
mode. More often the reverse would be the case. The distinction
between metaphoric and metonymic cannot, of course, be mechanically