Abstract: Metonymy is not only a simple rhetoric pattern, but a kind of basic cognitive style of human beings. Metonymy mainly operates on proximity principle, prominence principle and principle of causality. Driven by the principles of proximity and prominence, metonymy is achieved with part replacing the whole, the whole replacing the part and the part replacing the part. Driven by the principle of causality, it is achieved with reasons replacing results and results replacing reasons. These metonymy patterns not only explain conventional rhetoric in English literary works, but apply to organizational structure in literary discourse, which provides theoretical basis for artistic rhetoric in constructing repetition, bedding, and indirect speech of narrative structure. Metonymy explanation to English literary works help people to enjoy a variety of rhetorical formats, to quickly command the theme of texts, and to predict the plot and distinguish the implicit information. Explanation of metonymy cannot be done casually, and must follow the limits of contextual factors.

Key words: metonymy, defamiliarization rhetoric, artistic rhetoric, discourse, context