Childbirth as a Metaphor for Crisis

Download or read book Childbirth as a Metaphor for Crisis written by Claudia D. Bergmann and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2009-03-13 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Crises and catastrophes of all kinds have always confronted humans with great challenges. The present study examines the question of how literary texts process and deal with these challenges through the imaginary world of metaphors. It concentrates on the metaphor of childbirth, which compares people racked with crisis to women in labour (and sometimes vice versa). The texts examined are taken from the Ancient Orient and the Old Testament, together with a text exemplar from the Qumran corpus, which takes up the metaphor of childbirth and develops it further.