Department of English

• Thursday, May 2, 2024 - 3:30pm to 5:00pm

Fisher-Bennett Hall Graduate Lounge (Room 330)

Jonathan Dick presents “Colonial Mixed Metaphors," a work-in-progress from his dissertation. ResVic will co-host the WIP with us in the Grad Lounge (FBH 330) at 3:30 p.m. Here’s a description of the chapter draft:

This chapter offers a colonial history of the mixed metaphor as well as a history of the particular colonial mixed metaphors that captured the attention of the British reading public at the turn of the twentieth century, as parliamentarians began to question the empire's status in the build-up to Irish Home Rule. I argue that this new interest in mixed metaphor registered a growing sense of confusion around the status of Ireland as a colonial property during the period, and that they were of interest to journalists, humorists, grammarians, and English teachers alike because they made England's imperial decline seem like a crisis of style that could be corrected with enough attention to the tropes we use to describe it. After historicizing the mixed metaphor's rise in eighteenth-century English classrooms and following its spread through the pedagogical materials of the Anglophone world, I consider a specific mixed metaphor from a 1913 speech about Home Rule by the former Viceroy of India, which featured in the revised lectures on style offered by Caroline Spurgeon at both the Bedford College for Women, and Columbia University. What emerges is a story about the mixed metaphor as a trope that at once expresses the anxieties of an empire on its last legs and promises to correct them, through its assimilation into early-twentieth century British English classrooms.