DrLucas Thompson

Dr Thompson's forthcoming book, Metaphors We Read By: Rethinking Literary Experience and Interpretation (Edinburgh University Press, 2025), proposes a metaphorical approach to reading that offers new ways of understanding literary experience and interpretation. In doing so, it makes important contributions to current debates around method and interpretation, as well as literary aesthetics, postcritique, and ordinary language philosophy. Metaphors We Read By analyses a wide range of contemporary and twentieth-century novelists, including Marilynne Robinson, Toni Morrison, George Saunders, Elena Ferrante, Karl Ove Knausga?rd, Joy Williams, Ben Lerner, and John Williams.

Dr. Thompson's current book project, "The Mind's Ear: Literature and the Auditory Imagination," investigates how imagined sounds of all kinds (including dialogue, natural and machine-made noises, music, etc.) are activated for readers during literary experience. The project will provide a rich account of how sounds are generated and sustained in the imagination, exploring the wide variety of techniques that novelists deploy in order to activate the auditory imagination.