Michel Tournier and the metaphor of fiction

"Michel Tournier is France's most widely acclaimed living novelist, a writer who explores complex philosophical questions in the guise of concrete, imagistic narratives."--BOOK JACKET. "This comprehensive study of Tournier's fiction privileges the notion of literary reference, by which the world of text is understood or experienced in metaphorical relation to the world outside of it. Metaphor, viewed as a linguistic entity and principle of cognition, opens the door to the writer's imagination and, in the context of Tournier's fiction, shows how the fantastic merges with the real to provide new perspectives on many diverse aspects of the modern world: the Crusoe myth, Nazism, the value to society of art and religion, and the nature of education."--Jacket.