Nature and Blindness Metaphors in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Merchant's Tale and William Shakespeare's King Lear

Abstract

The present research attempts to study the use of nature and blindness metaphors in Chaucer's The Merchant's Tale and Shakespeare's King Lear. It tries to shed light on the writers' motives behind the use of this linguistic device in both literary works. Throughout this study, we hope at laying a finger on the authors' overuse of metaphor in these two literary works, focusing on its structure and meaning. This research is divided into three main s chapters. Chapter one presents a general survey on the basic concepts of metaphor because it is our main concern in this inquiry. Chapter two highlights a critical review of Chaucer's literature and Shakespeare's one, namely some views on both literary works. Chapter three is the investigation of metaphors of nature and blindness. Some metaphor markers will be discussed to find out the syntactic structure of metaphor and its meaning. This chapter sheds light on the reasons behind the use of nature and blindness metaphors in the two literary works. The adopted metaphor model is descriptive and it consists of particular structural and semantic components such as the tenor (T), the vehicle (V), and the topic (Tp).