About This Site
This blog-like site is composed of experiments and explications. Treated herein are select metaphors of mind from British eighteenth-century literature. A more complete collection of metaphors—some 8,700 metaphors—is taxonomized here in a beta-version of the The Mind is a Metaphor database.
You are viewing a cabinet of curiosities. When I fish out a peculiar and interesting metaphor from The Mind is a Metaphor database, I display and discuss it in these pages.
A metaphor is almost always situated in a larger constellation of related metaphors. Metaphors fit into different arguments in different ways; they mark out patterns in the history of thought.
New explications will be posted once every other month or so.
I/Brad am the Explicator. I am an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Virginia. My CV is available here.
It is my hope that these pages will attract attention to the dictionary of metaphors I’m composing and to the database that houses the evidence used in the composition of the dictionary. Both are works in progress.
