[Janice D. Soderling]

I've just acquired Alfred Corn's "The Metamorphoses of Metaphor". Allow me to quote from the preface.

(...) Which critic will help me more, one whose main concern is to write a "prose poem" about the novel, or one who has spent weeks and months, perhaps years, in following up references and discovering patterns of meaning not easily grasped on one reading? Of course I hope the informative critic has writerly abilities compatible with the authors examined--a readable and interesting style, values something more than conventional, and as I said before, imagination and intuition. But the first thing I ask of a critical work is that it tell me something--factual, thematic, formal--that I did not know beforehand.. Without the critic's help, I have little chance to reach anything more than a conversational knowledge of the always-increasing body of significant literary works.