Text-worlds, blending and allegory in ‘Flamingos in Dudley Zoo’ by Emma Purshouse

This paper will develop a cognitive stylistic framework drawn from Conceptual Integration (Blending) Theory (Fauconnier and Turner 2002), and Text World Theory, which uses the idea of elaboration sites as potential structural enablers in mapping across blend spaces. The framework will be used to investigate the operation of allegory and metaphor in Emma Purhouse’s poem ‘Flamingos in Dudley Zoo’. Previous work on blending and allegory is taken as a departure point for the exploration of the relationship between text-worlds and blends in allegory in order to investigate how a hybrid approach may produce a richer understanding of how the poem achieves its effects. The paper will examine the conceptual blends created by metaphors suggested by the allegory in terms of their input (source and target) spaces, and examine how these may create and enrich metaphoric text-worlds in the poem. The paper develops a text-world mechanism, the peri-text-world, that allows the source, target and blended worlds to be integrated into one complex that can allow the necessary mappings to proceed from the source world-system of the allegory, through the allegorical blend, to structure a target world. It will also consider how this mapping process creates the potential for a number of candidate targets and how that uncertainty helps the poem make its point.