Final published version, 1.87 MB, PDF document
Available under license: CC BY-NC-ND: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License
Final published version
Licence: CC BY-NC-ND: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
<mark>Journal publication date</mark> | 7/06/2021 |
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<mark>Journal</mark> | English Studies |
Issue number | 4 |
Volume | 102 |
Number of pages | 22 |
Pages (from-to) | 431-452 |
Publication Status | Published |
<mark>Original language</mark> | English |
This article interrogates two established critical approaches to Marilynne Robinson’s fiction. First, by analysing the Gilead novels’ engagement with nineteenth-century Transcendentalism, the article challenges the centrality of metaphor to Robinson’s literary project. I show how, in these novels, Robinson resurrects the nineteenth-century divide between Emersonian metaphor and Thoreauvian metonymy. There has been a recent critical move to understand Robinson’s fiction in relation to modern and contemporary literary forbears, but this article shows the complexity, contradiction and self-criticism that inheres in Robinson’s engagement with Transcendentalism. Secondly and connectedly, my argument complicates the current critical consensus that the home is the most significant locus of these novels. I argue that the indoor domestic spaces of the novels are associated with the metaphorical language that Robinson is critiquing and, in turn, that their garden spaces are associated with a form of language that has a more tangible relationship to action and process.