The Concept of Metamorphosis and its Metaphors

The article examines a number of links between the metaphorical uses of the concept of metamorphosis in literature and the various changes of the meaning of the concept that took place at the beginning of the modern scientific age between the 17th and 19th centuries, a period during which the notion of metamorphosis resurfaced in conflict with evolutionist thinking. We present the extent to which the concept of animal metamorphosis, the object of multiple redefinitions over the course of this historical period, became the vector of a very strong metaphorical meaning, which emerged in the literature of the period and survives to this day in certain children’s storybooks belonging to what we term the genre of “realistic fiction”. We intend, from a pedagogical standpoint, to identify which specific attributes of these metaphors exist in those storybooks, and to gauge the extent to which those attributes contradict the scientific characteristics and fictional representations of the concept of metamorphosis.