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Literary Criticism General

Missing Link

The Evolution of Metaphor and the Metaphor of Evolution

by (author) Jeffery Donaldson

Publisher
McGill-Queen's University Press
Initial publish date
Apr 2015
Category
General
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9780773582118
    Publish Date
    Apr 2015
    List Price
    $110.00
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9780773545199
    Publish Date
    Mar 2015
    List Price
    $45.95
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9780773545182
    Publish Date
    Mar 2015
    List Price
    $110.00

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Description

We look for missing links in the sciences and humanities, but the essential missing link - metaphor - is always in front of us. In Missing Link, Jeffery Donaldson unites literary criticism and evolutionary and cognitive science to show how metaphor has been with us since the beginning of time as a seed in the nature of things.

With examples from centuries of poets, critics, philosophers, and scientists, he details how metaphor is a chemistry, an exchange of energies forming and dissolving, and an openness in the spaces between things. He considers the ways in which DNA learns how to liken things that have been, how mutation makes errors and then tries them on, and how evolution is hypothesis - nature's way of "thinking more." The mind is a matrix of relations: neural synapses cascade into ever-changing pathways and patterns. Metaphor is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. It is the unbroken thread between matter and spirit.

Whether offering analysis of a turn of phrase or chemical reaction, Missing Link presents a vision of literature that is also a vision of the cosmos, and vice versa. It enters the debate between evolution and religion, and challenges scientists, literary theorists, and religious advocates to rethink the relations between their disciplines.

About the author

Jeffery Donaldson is the author of Palilalia, a finalist for the Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry, Waterglass, and Once out of Nature. He has also the co-editor of Frye and the Word:  Religious Contexts in the Writings of Northrop Frye. Donaldson teaches poetry and American literature at McMaster University. He lives on the Niagara Escarpment near Grimsby, Ontario. 

Jeffery Donaldson's profile page