Seneca's Images and Metaphors

M Armisen-Marchetti - The Cambridge Companion to Seneca, 2015 - books.google.com
M Armisen-Marchetti
The Cambridge Companion to Seneca, 2015books.google.com
A quick glance at a single page of Seneca's writing already demonstrates the number of
literary images it contains: metaphors, above all, but also similes, allegories, and even (more
subtly) metonymies. The most remarkable among these images, the ones that produce the
most vivid effect of distance from the literal, are definitely the metaphors and the similes. 1 In
the limited space of this chapter, therefore, these figures in particular will occupy our
attention, with the addition of a few words at the end about metonymy in the tragedies. As a …
A quick glance at a single page of Seneca’s writing already demonstrates the number of literary images it contains: metaphors, above all, but also similes, allegories, and even (more subtly) metonymies. The most remarkable among these images, the ones that produce the most vivid effect of distance from the literal, are definitely the metaphors and the similes. 1 In the limited space of this chapter, therefore, these figures in particular will occupy our attention, with the addition of a few words at the end about metonymy in the tragedies. As a methodological guideline, we will use Seneca’s own explicit principles for the analysis of these figures; these are principles themselves derived from concepts in ancient rhetoric. This approach is designed to emphasize the intellectual environment of our writer and avoid anachronism.
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