Metaphor used to belong to poetry. As a trope or figure, its scope in prose narrative is traditionally limited to an aspect of style. In a recent empirical study Gerard Steen sets out to prove that this commonly-held perception is misguided. In one of the tests devised by Steen a team of language experts were presented with a 25-line extract from Norman Mailer's Miami and the Siege of Chicago and asked to identify and isolate examples of metaphor. They agreed on nineteen cases. That there should be such a concentration of metaphors in any small text, let alone one written by a well-known literary star, should no longer be regarded as exceptional, for an increasing number of language specialists are moving towards the view articulated by the two scholars cited in the introduction to Steen's study who speak of metaphor as being situated in the ‘deepest and most general processes of human interaction with reality’. Current research driven by the work of Ortony, Lakoff and Johnson, and Dirven and Paprotté aims to investigate what the metaphorical basis of language reveals about the cognitive capacities of the human mind. However, just as interest in the workings of metaphor has extended far beyond the domain of literature, so the literary text has lost its privileged status as the site of metaphorical meaning. Literature is not an habitual mode of expression, therefore literary language is less interesting to researchers absorbed by the question of how we organise the reality around us than recorded speech, or even standard journalists’ reports. Thus, in metaphor studies literature has been sidelined. This general obliviousness may explain in part why comparatively few literary commentators have tapped into the rich fund of material resulting from the explosion in ‘metaphorology’ of the last twenty or so years.

Living at the end of the twentieth century, we are accustomed to contrast literary fiction as genre with documentary fact. This is a relatively recent development predicated on an assumption which is not always reliable. Stein Haugom Olsen cites writers as disparate in style, content and epoch as Richardson, Henry James and Malcolm Bradbury, all of whom refute the idea that literature, and in particular the novel, should be read as fiction.