The 18 contributions to this volume deal with a variety of 'tropes', such as metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony, euphemism, antonomasia and hyperbole. Using various approaches or paradigms the authors aim to find answers to the crucial epistemological questions, namely whether and to what extent utterances containing tropes can be said to be true or false.

Often described inadequately as the John Lennon or Bob Dylan of Brazil, Caetano Veloso is unquestionably one of the most influential and beloved of Brazilian artists and has developed a world-wide following. Now, in his long awaited memoir, he tells the heroic story of how, in the late 60s, he and a group of friends from the north-eastern state of Bahia created tropicalismo, the movement that shook Brazilian culture and civic order and pushed a nation then on the margins of world politics and economics into the pop avant-garde. Tropical Truth recounts the story of a country, its most subversive generation, and the odyssey of a brilliant constellation of artists. By turns erudite and playful, dreamlike and confessional, Tropical Truth is a revelation of Brazil's most famous artist, one of the greatest popular composers of the past century.

Tropes are not only rhetorical means, which are used as a creative and / or persuasive linguistic means in poetry and public speech. They are also a cognitive tool which helps people to understand the world and to express their world. As they are the basis on which our worldview and even our everyday speech is founded, the question must be posed as to whether utterances containing tropes can be said to be true. This has been an epistemological problem since Nietzsche expressed his doubts about the possibility that figurative language could give access to truth. However, since then research has paid little attention to this question. ‐18 papers by linguists, philosophers, psychologists and literary scholars have been collected in this volume. Their 21 authors use various approaches or paradigms in order to define metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony, euphemism, antonomasia and hyperbole and find an answer to the crucial epistemological questions, namely whether and to what extent utterances containing tropes can be said to be true or false.

"This is an extremely rigorous, thorough piece of superior scholarship on one of the most important figures in the history of cinema. Benamou introduces a wealth of material on the production process and the repercussions of this project in Latin America, which have been entirely missing from earlier, auteur-centered accounts; this alone makes it a book of great importance. We can't ask for a more definitive, groundbreaking study than the one Benamou has given us."—Bill Nichols, author of Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde

Daniel has escaped Nazi Germany with nothing but a desperate dream that he might one day find his parents again. But that golden land called New York has turned away his ship full of refugees, and Daniel finds himself in Cuba. As the tropical island begins to work its magic on him, the young refugee befriends a local girl with some painful secrets of her own. Yet even in Cuba, the Nazi darkness is never far away . . .