Book description
The metaphor of contagion pervades critical discourse across the
humanities, the medical sciences, and the social sciences. It appears in
such terms as 'social contagion' in psychology, 'financial contagion' in
economics, 'viral marketing' in business, and even 'cultural contagion'
in anthropology. In the twenty-first century, contagion, or 'thought
contagion' has become a byword for creativity and a fundamental process
by which knowledge and ideas are communicated and taken up, and
resonates with Andrà © Siegfried's observation that 'there is a
striking parallel between the spreading of germs and the spreading of
ideas'.
In Contagious Metaphor
, Peta Mitchell offers an innovative, interdisciplinary study of the
metaphor of contagion and its relationship to the workings of language.
Examining both metaphors of contagion and metaphor as
contagion, Contagious Metaphor
suggests a framework through which the emergence and often
epidemic-like reproduction of metaphor can be better understood. Peta
Mitchell's highly readable Contagious Metaphor explores medical and
popular beliefs and practices about contagionà Â-and the metaphors that
shape them. Reaching back through the nineteenth century and then
ranging widely through more recent decades, she shows how ambivalence
about figurative language and misunderstanding of metaphor itself has
shaped our responses to epidemics both imagined and experienced. From
miasma to Dionysian frenzy to memes on the internet, Mitchell challenges
our assumptions about both language and contagion, providing engaging
and provocative analyses of examples from film, philosophy, linguistics
and literature. Peta Mitchell is Senior Lecturer in the School of
English, Media Studies, and Art History at the University of Queensland,
Australia, and author of Cartographic Strategies of Postmodernity
(Routledge, 2008).
