"I've always been surprised at the degree of success of The Mirror and the Lamp and the range and duration of esteem for it. … I had no reason to expect in 1953 that it would appeal to more than a specialized group interested in literary criticism. I think one of the reasons why it's been of interest to a broad spectrum of readers is because one of its emphases was on the role of metaphors in steering human thinking. It was a very early book to insist on the role of metaphors in cognition, as well as in imaginative literature — to claim that key metaphors help determine what and how we perceive and how we think about our perceptions. … Natural Supernaturalism is quite well known and even used as a textbook, but it never seems to have attracted the acclaim of its predecessor."
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Academics from the United StatesLiterary criticsJews from the United StatesPeople from New JerseyCentenarians
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M. H. Abrams
Meyer (Mike) Howard Abrams (23 July 1912 – 22 April 2015) was an American literary critic, known for works on Romanticism, in particular his book The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (1971).
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