Word: metaphors
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...brief in fiction. A native Mississippian herself, Ellen Douglas has made her argument palpable in her milieu. The Southern-Gothic setting-decaying classical porticos plus mazes of wisteria and Confederate jasmine-closes around the reader and, like a perfect symbol, becomes the substance as well as the metaphor for the author's theme of human dissolution. The politics of old age turns into the poetry of mortality...
This is a deadeyed, deadpan existential amorality play that has found a metaphor to make the 1950s come alive. At least it spins a superbly ironic fairy tale out of the emotional hibernation of those years in America, the simmering, collective detachment that could muffle hysteria and dull death...
...more ingenuity, greater effort and less tenderizer.) History's most prominent fisherman was, of course, St. Peter, who later turned to netting souls. In the years A.D., angling was seen as something more than the mere coaxing of coldblooded vertebrates from water. Consider, for example, Shakespeare's metaphor...
...culminating moral of the book, drawing superficially on the age-old metaphor of the stage of life, throws Prose's sensibilities for her characters into sharp relief. Looking through a window onto the world's future, Isabella agrees with the angels: human life is "just a series of stories and plays, most of which are exactly the same!" There is no reason to regret a bad life if it is "all just a story." Although reluctantly, Prose does allot Isabella a two-sentence demurral to finish the book: she wonders how the Glorious Ones' yearnings for earthly fame fit into...
Brecht had read a German novel about Chicago and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle just before he started to write In the Jungle of Cities. A jungle is an apt, if overused, metaphor for the most grotesque, competitive aspects of a city--John D. Rockefeller, invoking Darwin to describe his goals for the capitalist economy, suggested how apt the comparison can be--and Brecht populates his jungle with Baboon and another henchman cleverly named Worm to emphasize the point. But otherwise he ignores the real psychology of city life in order to concentrate on the petty idiosyncracies of his characters...