The ‘Literary Mind’ and changes: Conceptual and referential (dis)continuity in the construction of identities

My purpose is to study two forms of creation of (fictitious) entities: by metamorphosis and by metaphor. Though these operations are not situated at the same ontological level (being respectively phenomena of observable — or imaginable — transformation vs discursive evolutions), the fact remains that they have the following point in common, that they modify identities, by mixing, exchanging or changing properties, and thus by their integration into a new category. My purpose will therefore be to prolong this conceptual analysis by a comparison of the textual sequences and the referential expressions where these two types of change appear; this will enable us to see that, though they often coexist, these operations have distinct semantic bases and therefore induce different interpretations — but sometimes only up to a certain point.