Children's Metaphors

From a socio cultural point of view, creativity and literariness are not linked to canonical text alone, but society and how communities and cultures view and understand text, and the importance they place on literature, play a significant part in determining creativity and literariness. Eagleton (2006) highlights how the criteria of what counted as literature has changed from being strictly ideological, and embodied by the values and tastes of a particular social class to a broader concept of all social classes (pg.25). As you can see the two extracts show how the author pushes traditional boundaries of literature, as the story extract is written in a colloquial language and is hugely entertaining and not moralistic like traditional children’s

Metaphors are not always novel, and conventionalised metaphors are an easier way to express and share meaning with people, for example in the 5th paragraph of the web blog ‘sort the mind out’ ,‘dogs will pick up on the fact…’ also ‘feed off their emotions’ and ‘I can’t hang about’ in the last line of the story extract could be viewed as common every day, prosaic conceptual metaphors, which are most likely used without calculated intention. Metaphors like "Fear is a slinking cat I find beneath the lilacs of my mind."(Sophie Tunnell, "Fear"), this kind of metaphor is novel in my opinion, as it is the opposite of a conceptual metaphor and has most likely been constructed with much thought. However metaphors hold different levels of meaning and significance depending on different communities and cultures. So in light of Cameron’s study it could be argued that metaphors were traditionally seen as a literary technique, but studies now show that everyday metaphors may not necessarily be a literary use of language. Metaphor in literature draws on the stock of everyday and conceptual metaphors we use in everyday language, therefore the metaphors found in both texts can be seen as everyday creative language use that possibly holds no significant literary