Title Page; Contents; Acknowledgements; List of Abbreviations; Preface; 1: Perspectives on Metaphor and Literary Fiction; 2: Suspended Animation: Vendredi ou Les limbes du Pacifique; 3: The Drive for Reference; 4: The Kingdom of the Narrator; 5: The Empire of the Child; Conclusion; Notes to Preface; Bibliography; Index.
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Michel Tournier is a writer who explores complex philosophical questions in the guise of concrete, imagistic narratives. This comprehensive study privileges the notion of literary reference, by which the world of text is understood or experienced in metaphorical relation to the world outside of it. Metaphor, in the context of Tournier's fiction, shows how the fantastic merges with the real to provide new perspectives on many diverse aspects of the modern world : the Crusoe myth, Nazism, the value to society of art and religion, and the nature of education. This book elucidates an aesthetic of Tournier's fiction that encompasses the writer's stated ambition to go beyond literature.