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Author Kilgour, Maggie, 1957- author.

Title From communion to cannibalism : an anatomy of metaphors of incorporation / Maggie Kilgour
Published Princeton, New Jersey : Princeton University Press, [1990]
©1990

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Description 1 online resource (322 pages)
Contents Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Metaphors and Incorporation -- CHAPTER I. Classical Incremental Visions -- CHAPTER II. The Word and Flesh -- CHAPTER III. The Reformation of the Host -- CHAPTER IV. Under the Sign of Saturn -- CHAPTER V. The Reformed Deformed -- Conclusion: In Which Everything Is Included and Nothing Concluded -- Notes -- Index
Summary Focusing on such metaphors as communion and cannibalism in a wide range of Western literary works, Maggie Kilgour examines the opposition between outside and inside and the strategies of incorporation by which it is transcended. This opposition is basic to literature in that it underlies other polarities such as those between form and content, the literal and metaphorical, source and model. Kilgour demonstrates the usefulness of incorporation as a subsuming metaphor that describes the construction and then the dissolution of opposites or separate identities in a text: the distinction between outside and inside, essentially that of eater and eaten, is both absolute and unreciprocal and yet fades in the process of ingestion--as suggested in the saying "you are what you eat.". Kilgour explores here a fable of identity central to Western thought that represents duality as the result of a fall from a primal symbiotic unity to which men have longed to return. However, while incorporation can be desired as the end of alienation, it can also be feared as a form of regression through which individual identity is lost. Beginning with the works of Homer, Ovid, Augustine, and Dante, Kilgour traces the ambivalent attitude toward incorporation throughout Western literature. She examines the Eucharist as a model for internalization in Renaissance texts, addresses the incorporation of past material in the nineteenth century, and concludes with a discussion of the role of incorporation in cultural theory today. Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 249-300) and index
Notes In English
Print version record
Subject Internalization in literature.
Ingestion in literature.
Cannibalism in literature.
Metaphor.
Metaphor
metaphor.
LITERARY CRITICISM -- General.
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY -- Literary.
Metaphor
Cannibalism in literature
Ingestion in literature
Internalization in literature
Languages & Literatures.
Literature - General.
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9781400860784
1400860784