The Relevance of Metaphor: Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop and Seamus Heaney

This book considers metaphor as a communicative phenomenon in the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop and Seamus Heaney, in light of the relevance theory account of communication first developed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson in the 1980s. The first half of the book introduces relevance theory, situating it in relation to literary criticism, and then surveys the history of metaphor in literary studies and assesses relevance theory’s account of metaphor, including recent developme...