Abstract
A literary context does affect interpretation in systematic ways, producing recognizable if defeasible differences between metaphors in literature and in face-to-face discourse. Most of these effects apply in roughly similar ways to all aspects of literary interpretation that depart from explicit, conventionally encoded meaning. In the case of literary texts and metaphors, people likewise aim to figure out what their producers were up to; but the fact that the object of interpretation is a published work of art makes the relationship between producer and recipient less direct, more collaborative, and more driven by aesthetic than practical ends. Publicity and uni-directionality both serve to restrict the range of assumptions readers can appeal to in interpreting literary metaphors. Cutting against these limitations, the fact that the metaphor occurs in a published text means that readers can assume, at least provisionally, that every aspect of it is the result of reflective choice and not just temporal exigency.