Beyond the big hedge Storytelling, allegorisation and metafiction in Ursula K. Le Guin's The Poacher

Abstract

This paper examines the dynamics between literal and figurative meaning in Ursula K. Le Guin's short story The Poacher, a rewriting of The Sleeping Beauty. It aims to show how, through narrative strategies and rhetorical figures, the text regularly distances us from the level of the literal meaning, giving the impression that there is more to it than that. The elements of the material and natural environment, and the dynamic, plot-forming motifs, are transformed into signs of something else. Le Guin rewrites the classic tale while allegorising this activity itself – the series of operations of penetrating and intervening in the order of an alien textual world – not in an intrusive didactic manner, but in a restrained way that is organic to the story. The figure of the poacher and his activity take on a hidden meaning from the perspective of rewriting . This "double tone" leads to a division of the reader's attention, a constant oscillation between the two levels of meaning, and a disruption of immersive reading. The paper seeks to shed light on this phenomenon by drawing on narratological, rhetorical, semiotic and cognitive poetics approaches.