Textual Metonymy employs a theoretical framework combining rhetoric, figurative theory and textlinguistics. In the process, a very full historical account of treatments of metonymy from classical traditions up to the present time is given and critiqued. The author proposes a semiotic approach to the treatment of metonymy, on the basis of which a textual model of metonymy as a process of representation is developed to account for text cohesion and text coherence.