ABSTRACT
The present Introduction, like all Introductions, is retrospective: it looks back over and offers some conclusions from what is about to follow. But it is even more so because the studies in this book, focused on questions of rhetoric, gender and property, have been the work of several years, through stages of development both in my own thinking and in the direction of literary theory and criticism.The oldest,“ The Metaphorical Plot”— first published in an interdisciplinary collection on metaphorcontains the germ of the subsequent direction of the investigations here, and two of the links in the subtitle, between rhetoric and property. Extended into a reading of a particular text, it led, in the second-written essay-an analysis of Wuthering Heights for a symposium on the identity of the literary text-into more detailed interrogation of the relation between the unsettling mobility of tropes such as metaphor and the boundary markers of private property.
