About the author: Victoria de Zwaan, born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, emigrated to Canada, where she finished an interdisciplinary undergraduate degree at Trent University before completing graduate degrees in English Literature at McGill and the University of Toronto. She teaches courses in experimental fiction, the history of the novel, and literary theory for both the Cultural Studies Program and the Department of English Literature at Trent University.
2002 0-7734-7280-0 This study argues that the often-noted resistance to interpretation by these authors’ experimental fiction has to do with the radical functioning of metaphor in their texts. After an introductory discussion about the contemporary debates about metaphor and narrative, she examines each author’s work in various theoretical contexts such as cognitivist models, deconstruction, modernism and post-modernism, concentrating on a number of narrative strategies which she groups under the term piracy. The conclusion situates the metaphoric narrative in relation to the competing literary critical paradigms of postmodernist fiction.