Evincing the soul of a city

Background: This article outlines how poetry is able to configure the soul of a cityscape through the modes of personification and metaphors of public space. Purpose: It argues that these modes are so intertwined in reality that it is possible to gather a sense of a city’s soul through experiential,...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Brown, Alistair (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Routledge [2020]
In: Journal of beliefs and values
Year: 2020, Volume: 41, Issue: 4, Pages: 433-445
Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains:B City / Poetic language / Metaphor / Personification / Figuration (Sociology) / Soul
RelBib Classification:AB Philosophy of religion; criticism of religion; atheism
ZB Sociology
Further subjects:B Soul music
B Poetry
B City
Online Access: Volltext (Resolving-System)
Description
Summary:Background: This article outlines how poetry is able to configure the soul of a cityscape through the modes of personification and metaphors of public space. Purpose: It argues that these modes are so intertwined in reality that it is possible to gather a sense of a city’s soul through experiential, rhythmical, temporal and transmigratory images of cityscape. Design: The article applies a typology of metaphors and personification as the basis for the analysis of the soul’s presence in a city Main argument and findings: The results of the study show that named and unnamed literal, figurative and personified terms help evince the transmigration of the city’s soul. Originality and value: An implication arising from this finding is that figurative language offers considerable transfers of meaning from one epistemic element to another to enable a nuanced understanding of cityscapes. There appears an unassailable case for the union of cities and poetry as part of our scholarly studies on spiritual literacy.
ISSN:1469-9362
Contains:Enthalten in: Journal of beliefs and values
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1080/13617672.2020.1746877