Metaphors the East Is Othered by: A Critical-cognitive Study of Metaphor in Lady Sheil’s Travelogue Glimpses of Life and Manners in Persia

Abstract

Abstract-Regarding travel writing as the textual manifestation of the Self and the Other confrontation, travelogues provide interesting material for analyzing otherness discourse and various strategies of othering. Accordingly, this paper aims to study how metaphor functions as an othering device in travel writing. The travelogue which is the subject of this research is Glimpses of Life and Manners in Persia written by Lady Sheil in the mid-nineteenth century. The framework employed for analyzing metaphor in this text is Critical Metaphor Analysis which is amongst various approaches of cognitive poetics. The critical-cognitive analysis of metaphors in this travelogue implies that Sheil metaphorized Persia mainly as an Oriental Other which has a denigrated inferior position relative to the Occidental Self. In so doing, she has vastly used different stereotypical images of the East abundantly present in the Orientalist discourse. It can be argued that Orientalism as a discourse has exerted great influence on Sheil's metaphorization of Persia as an Eastern Other via a number of conceptual metaphors which characterize the East as a unified object which has no diversity and should be studied by European scholars.