The chapter is concerned with metaphor and focusses specifically on war metaphors in political discourses. The cognitive mechanisms at work in metaphor are described with an emphasis on frames as the unit of conceptual organisation that gets mapped in political metaphors. Recent experimental studies demonstrating the framing effects of metaphor are discussed. The war frame is described to include discussion of intertextuality as a means of accessing it. Three case studies are then presented exploring war metaphors in discourses of Covid-19, Brexit and immigration. Analogies with the first and second world wars in particular are highlighted and critiqued. The chapter defines and discusses extreme metaphors illustrated through examples in which immigrants are compared to animals and closes with a discussion of how readers may resist extreme metaphors.

This chapter bridges environmental humanities and Black humanities by examining a figure largely, if curiously, excluded from the “ecocritical” canon: Charles Chesnutt, the first African American writer of commercially successful fiction. Reading literary environmentalism beyond the lenses of Romanticism or transcendentalism, Forbes finds in Chesnutt’s late nineteenth-century conjure tales a richly imagined Black environmental heritage that connected race and nature. Chesnutt’s short fiction featuring metamorphoses of humans into plants and animals represents a key node in an alternate, and nonlinear, Black environmentalist timeline. In contrast to environmentalisms that pit nature’s interests against humans’, the insights we see at flashpoints across this tradition, and crucially in Chesnutt’s conjure tales, belie narratives of human/nature separation that underpin most “white” environmentalisms. Moreover, his marshaling of racialized nonhuman agencies also helps us address persistent difficulties associated with new materialist theorizing. Fusing human/plant/animal agencies to frameworks of care and nurturance, characters in Chesnutt’s conjure tales weaponize “waste” against enslavement’s inhuman valuation systems.

J. Blake Couey, in “Isaiah as Poetry,” begins with the basic fact that nearly all of the book is written as poetry and encourages readers to approach it as such. He surveys its erudite vocabulary, its creative use of sound, and its parallelism and larger strophic structures. He closes with an extended appreciation of the “imaginative worlds” evoked in the book through the use of imagery and metaphors. He observes of its poetic vision that “its scope is nearly boundless.”

Hanne Løland Levinson’s “Gendered Imagery in Isaiah” looks at one of the most significant and striking features of Isaiah: its repeated use of feminine imagery for God. She begins with an advanced yet accessible discussion of how metaphors work, then goes on to analyze how the use of imagery comparing God to a pregnant woman, a midwife, and a breastfeeding mother—alongside more widespread masculine imagery—combine to challenge and transform the ways in which readers perceive God. In conclusion, she points out the importance of female god-language in a world in which gender continues to be a basis for inequality and exclusion.

This chapter moves from the macro-level of social and narrative imagination to the micro-level of speaking and seeing. It continues to consider the interplay of inheritance and originality in these practices: the constitutive underdetermination or equivocity of what we see and say. The chapter illuminates the ways in which even at the smallest levels, we construct the world imaginatively. It then begins to discuss how art and poetry loosen the grasp of automated perception and do not impose an alternative vision but rather grant a double vision of our lives, allowing us to see it from new perspectives or in new ways. The chapter concludes with a consideration of liturgical and biblical renewals of perception.

A bitch, as most people already know, is a female dog. As a trendy word we hear (and say) all the time, it might be tempting to guess that it isn’t very old. But if we look up its etymology, that is, the origins of the word, we discover that bitch meaning “a female dog” has a far longer pedigree that goes back over one thousand years. Over the course of a millennium, bitch became stigmatized by its association with social taboos such as prostitution, promiscuity, “bad” women, and “unmanly” men. This led to its offensive senses pushing out the inoffensive one. Bitch – which was once just the literal word for a female dog – eventually became what it is today, arguably one of the most insulting words in the English language. But on the other hand, bitch has developed positive uses in slang and has even been reclaimed in some ways.

Most intelligence models include an array of processes and mechanisms that enable experts to generalize their knowledge and processes during career transitions and produce flexibility in cognitive structures that enable individuals to overcome limitations in applying expert knowledge and processes across domains and functional areas. These processes have been described variously as insightful thinking, induction, eduction, elaborating and mapping, novelty and metaphorical capacity, inductive inference, divergent production abilities, analogy, flexibility of use, and closure. They are discussed in light of the retrospective interviews with twenty-four elite performers in three domains (business, sports, and music) who successfully and repeatedly transitioned to higher positions within their field.

The final chapter draws together the themes of the book. It uses the work of Derrida, Levi, Camus, and Judith Butler to delineate the way in which carnivorism operates as an ideology of violence; it argues that much harm against the human results from the way in which we misunderstand and misconceptualise the animal. It also suggests the limitations of metaphorical thinking with regards the human–animal relationship, and suggests that a metonymical conception, based on association and contiguity, may serve both human and animal better.

The chapter opens with an overview of basic categories within the field of study of lexical semantics. It next presents fundamental concepts related to the lexicon, especially the lexeme as the basic unit of lexicology. It also analyzes the concept of lexical meaning and provides a brief overview of some of the approaches adopted in the study of denotation and connotation. The central part of the chapter describes polysemy and its basic mechanisms – metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche. The examples feature Serbian and other Slavic lexemes exhibiting the richest polysemy. The next section tackles syntagmatic lexical relations, the notion of collocation and the role of context in the study of lexical meaning. Paradigmatic lexical relations are also observed, especially synonymy and antonymy, both true and contextual or quasi-.

The introductory chapter is framed by the story of Ergoteles, a major Panhellenic victor and the only athlete whose epinikian ode and epigram have survived to the present day. The differences and similarities in the characterization of Ergoteles in each medium prompt the book’s main question: how does place, performance mode, and genre affect the representation of athletic identity? The bulk of the introduction outlines the angelia, the proclamation of victory by a herald at an athletic event. By stressing our – and ancient audiences – inability to access the actual speech-act, the chapter reinterprets the angelia as it persists in epinikian and epigram as an allusive representation, the modification and manipulation of which lies at the core of the verse celebration of athletic victory.

While the figure of herald and the actual angelia at the athletic site sit at the beginning of athletic praise, these real figures and actual proclamations are not the only heralds and messages that find their way into epinikian song and inscribed epigram. Rather, explicit and implicit references to the figure of the herald and the angelia are frequent in both genres. This chapter examines implicit and explicit heralds and messages across epinikian song and inscribed epigram. It focuses on the figure of the herald and the message and their ability to authenticate what are, in fact, secondary and elaborated speech-acts. By attaching themselves to the voice of the herald at the Games, epinikian songs and epigrams demand that audiences take their praise seriously, as if it were the voice of herald itself in the sacred landscape of a Panhellenic sanctuary.

This chapter focuses on elaborations from the categories of the angelia - the herald’s proclamation of victory - that are so productive for epinikian verse. The angelia’s utility for epinikian song goes beyond simply reinforcing authority or justifying praise. While the epinikian singer was undoubtedly provided the “facts of identity," they do not dryly report these facts; moreover, in some cases they do not report the specific “facts” of the angelia at all. “Identity,” in epinikian song’s modification of the angelia, is a subjective category, and the “facts” that relate to the victor – name, father’s name, polis, festival, and event – are not set in stone but rather creatively reworked, sometimes reimagined, and sometimes made extremely complex, in the context of song and its performance. By replacing fathers and integrating family, spinning myths derived from the victor’s polis or the festival site, and using the details of athletic practice itself as a mode of praising, the epinikian singer uses the angelia to structure his song and praise his patron (or patrons).

This chapter examines a series of athletic dedications to trace both the evolution of the epigrammatic representation of the angelia - the herald’s proclamation of victory at an athletic festival - and to define the particular characteristics of the epigram as an athletic dedication. While a continuity exists between modes of athletic verse, epigrams – as inscriptions – and epinikian songs – as choral performances – function differently and interact with different audiences. Epigrams do not, for example, use large-scale mythic narratives to bestow glory on their patrons, but they do circumscribe the movements and voices of their audiences and use the religiously and culturally important sites of their dedication to add to their meaning.