ABSTRACT
The relation between literature and telling the truth has been debated for millennia. On one hand, literature may be expected to give written depictions of the world as it is: an idea that we find in the Ancient Greek concept of mimesis, for example, or in nineteenth-century realism. On the other, creative writers tend to make things up; and, for many people, literature and fiction are almost synonyms. Metaphor, one of the most characteristic features of literary language, embodies this paradox. Metaphors and metonyms in literature tend to carry more weight than they do in ordinary conversations. Irony, allegory, metaphor, and metonymy: they matter so much in Macbeth, and in so many other works of literature, because they are so fundamental to the strange world that we live in, and to our own strange minds. Irony becomes aggressive and depersonalised, shading into satire, in which a state of affairs is attacked through exaggeration or by being espoused with conspicuous insincerity.
