Italy as a cultural metonymy in John Henry Newman's Loss and gain (1848)

Abstract

By drawing on a composite methodology involving cognitive linguistics and narrative analysis, this paper discusses the metonymical narrative strategy used by John Henry Newman in his autobiographical novel Loss and Gain, in which the author's self is displaced in an alter-ego. It argues that the same strategy is employed by the narrator to both reveal conversion as the main narrative isotopy of the novel, and to metonymically functionalize Italian culture as a locus a simili to question the controversy between Anglicans and Catholics in Victorian England.