Rethinking Metonymy

Sebastian Matzner is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature at King's College London, where he earned his Ph.D. in Classics and Comparative Literature in 2012. His doctoral thesis, entitled 'The Forgotten Trope: Metonymy in Poetic Action', won the University of Heidelberg's Prize for Classical Philology and Literary Theory and he was subsequently awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship to pursue his postdoctoral research project 'Beautiful Tyrants: Postcolonial Reflections on Philhellenism in Rome and Germany' at the University of Oxford. After lectureships in Classics and Latin Language and Literature at Oxford and the University of Exeter respectively, he returned to King's College London in September 2015.

• 1: Introduction: Metonymy - the Forgotten Trope? Metonymia at Aulis Metonymy - the Forgotten Trope? Tropology and the Formal Method: A Reappraisal of Descriptive Poetics Finding Metonyms in Poetic Action: The Text Corpus Standard Usage, Literary Aesthetics, and Literary Lexicography Enter the Reader 2: Contiguity and its (Dis-)Contents: Metonymy in Theory Between Forgotten Trope and Master Trope - Why Metonymy Matters Tropes and Figures Tropicality, the Tropical Space, and the Tropes Mapping the Tropical Space Developments in Theory of Metaphor 'Contiguity' and its (Dis-)Contents: Characterizing Metonymy Lexical Contiguity: Metonymy and the Theory of Semantic Fields 3: Forms and Effects: Metonymy in Poetic Action Index Metonymy Amplification Metonymy Grammatical Metonymy Metonymic Presences 4: Beyond Theory: Metonymy in Critical Practice Metonymy and Translation Criticism Metonymy and Stylistic Criticism Metonymy and (Post-)Structuralist Criticism 5: Conclusion Endmatter Bibliography General Index Index of Passages Discussed

This important book sheds light on four quite different fields: Greek poetic usage in its greatest age, and German, in its; translation studies; and, above all, poetic theory. The most important outcome is a new and greatly enhanced understanding of metonymy. Crucially, Matzner's theory of metonymy insists on the primacy of literary usage, and he conducts his theorizing, as all such theorizing should be conducted, as a negotiation between existing theory and significant literary instances. In the process, the limitations of existing theory— still stuck in the world of Greco-Roman rhetoric, with or without some pointers (but little more) from Roman Jakobson and some distractions from cognitive linguistics—are patiently, lucidly, and sensitively exposed. This is a work of great acumen and striking originality.