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>Since then we've had The Novel. And the break-up of the metrical consensus >at the beginning of the twentieth century (OK, Blake predates this, but he >doesn't begin to become generally influential before the 1890s. Each change >shifts the grounds on which the argument is conducted. > >As to where we are now ... The short-lived Martian School in England in the >eighties suggests that we can't (much as I'd like to -- beautifully simple >if nothing else) return to Aristotle's "poetry is metaphor". Isn't all writing playing with metaphor, even the most rigorously unmetaphorical? Thinking here say of some of Handke's work. And of all texts for theatre. Even Duras, whose suspicion of theatrical illusion was so intense she finally had people just reading texts, couldn't get rid of the fact that as soon as someone is on stage it's a metaphor. I looked at Gray again and thought, yes, I was pulling a long bow there - but still, he does ask prose to do unexpected things which challenge the assumption of narrative, a safe house for most prose which doesn't do much else with its language. Best Alison