Authority Figures

Reveals how certain strategic metaphors embedded in the early Western literary canon have promoted—and continue to promote—systems of inequality and social control. Collins examines texts ranging from the Homeric epics and the Platonic dialogues to Virgil's Aeneid and the Book of Revelation. Drawing on the linguistic and documentary evidence of usages in early societies, chiefly Greek and Hebrew, Collins has produced a penetrating examination of social and personal structures in those worlds.

Christopher Collins is professor of English at New York University. His previous books include The Act of Poetry, Reading the Written Image: Verbal Play, Interpretation, and the Roots of Iconophobia, and The Poetics of the Mind's Eye: Literature and the Psychology of Imagination.