From Metaphors to Metonymies: Two Paradigms of Nature Writing in American Southern Literature

Nature writing is an integral part of American Southern literature. This article analyses The Sound and the Fury written by William Faulkner, the icon of the “Southern Renaissance”, and Mama Day, a critically acclaimed work by contemporary African American female writer Gloria Naylor, focusing on their different strategies of nature writing from the perspective of rhetoric. It unveils the metaphorical and metonymical aspects of the natural symbols in these two novels respectively and further points out the gap is caused by divergent ways of plotting so as to write the Southern history— Faulkner, as a modernist writer, chooses the romantic way, while Naylor, belonging to the postmodernists, writes a tragedy