Download or read book Michel Tournier and the Metaphor of Fiction written by David Platten and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 1999-03-01 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michel Tournier is a writer who explores complex philosophical questions in the guise of concrete, imagistic narratives. This comprehensive study privileges the notion of literary reference, by which the world of text is understood or experienced in metaphorical relation to the world outside of it. Metaphor, in the context of Tournier’s fiction, shows how the fantastic merges with the real to provide new perspectives on many diverse aspects of the modern world: the Crusoe myth, Nazism, the value to society of art and religion, and the nature of education. This book elucidates an aesthetic of Tournier’s fiction that encompasses the writer’s stated ambition to ‘go beyond literature’.