Metaphor and Animal Studies

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.