Since the rise of cognitivism, little attention has been paid to the appearances and actions of creative metaphors. This monograph tries to fill this gap from an interdisciplinary perspective, committing insights from psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, philosophy and literary studies. The central claim is that metaphor should not be dealt with as an ornament or a tool, but as an event. Resting on a theory of conceptual poetics and the functional difference between reader and recipient, three necessary criteria of creative metaphoricity - deviance from an internal conceptual pattern; co-occurrence of simultaneously activated concepts; and "Entfremdung," filling the reader with a sense of unfamiliarity and intimacy - are defined, which make metaphorical meaning conceivable as essentially biaxial and interconceptual. Creative metaphor temporarily suspends communicative interaction and changes the balance of power between text and reader. Finally, two interpretive paradigms (substitution, analogy) are exposed as efforts to circumvent the performance of creative metaphor. (Benjamin Biebuyck)