ABSTRACT
Here are two openings to two classic novels, Dickens’s Bleak House and E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India:
(A Passage to India) The critic David Lodge, basing his analysis on the work of the Russian linguist Roman Jakobson, has argued that two major literary tropes, metaphor and metonymy, constitute the basis of two major literary styles of modern writing. According to Lodge, metaphor corresponds to Modernism and Symbolism, while metonymy corresponds to anti-Modernism and Realism. In terms of the historical development of literature from Romanticism through Realism to Symbolism and Modernism, there has been an alternation of
style from the metaphoric to the metonymic back and forth through the twentieth century, in prose and poetry and drama.
