Metaphor, Identity, and Cultural Representation in Literary Narratives: A Cognitive Stylistic Analysis
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.65310/hb8wfj30Keywords:
Cognitive Stylistics, Conceptual Metaphor, Cultural Identity, Indonesian Literature, Comparative Literature.Abstract
Metaphor links bodily experience, social categories, and cultural knowledge to the representation of identity in literary narrative. This study examines how metaphor organizes identity and cultural representation across a balanced comparative sample comprising Marah Rusli’s Sitti Nurbaya, Merari Siregar’s Azab dan Sengsara, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India. A MIPVU-informed cognitive-stylistic protocol was applied to 96 high-salience metaphorical expressions, with 24 items purposively sampled from each novel. Each expression was classified according to source domain, metaphor type, identity function, and cultural frame, followed by descriptive comparison across the Indonesian and Anglophone subcorpora. Body/Heart and Nature/Force were the most frequent source domains, jointly accounting for 34.4% of the coded expressions, while structural metaphors constituted 62.5% of the sample. The Indonesian novels demonstrated broader source-domain dispersion and stronger moral-spiritual framing, with distinctive representations of gender/adat and mobility, whereas Jane Eyre concentrated strongly on agency and selfhood. A Passage to India emphasized colonial-political and cultural/communal identity, particularly through metaphors of power, place, and collective relations. The findings indicate that metaphor operates not merely as literary ornament but as a patterned cognitive-stylistic resource through which narratives construct agency, belonging, obligation, relational experience, and cultural difference.
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