The Age of Allegory

2010

t h e c a m b r i d g e c o m p a n i o n t o a l l e g o r y Allegory is a vast subject, and its history can be daunting to students and even advanced scholars venturing outside their own historical specializations. This Companion will present, lucidly, systematically, and expertly, the various threads that comprise the allegorical tradition over its entire chronological range. Beginning with Greek antiquity, the volume shows how the earliest systems of allegory arose in poetry dealing with philosophy, mystery religions, and hermeneutics. Once the earliest histories and themes of the allegorical tradition have been presented, the volume turns to literary, intellectual, and cultural manifestations of allegory through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The essays in the last section address literary and theoretical approaches to allegory in the modern era, from reactions to allegory in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to reevaluations of its power in the thought of the twentieth century and beyond.

This collection of essays focuses on the ubiquity of the allegorical imagination in pre-modern western culture, and participates in a recent wave of resurgence of interest in the complex practices and ideas usually defined by the word 'allegory'. The contributors study the impact of the allegorical imagination on the production, reception and interpretation of literature, as well as its function as a tool of philosophical and theological enquiry, and its role in shaping the visual arts. Essays focus on subjects as varied as the general theories on allegory, allegory's relation to the human imagination, its usefulness or even inevitability as a human mode of cognition and its potential for the encoding of meanings that may be political, historical, religious and amorous. They discuss canonical figures such as Petrarch, Boccaccio, Boethius, Hans Memling, Pico della Mirandola, King James I and John Donne, but extend to include neglected but equally important figures such as Stephen Hawes or Thomas Usk as well as thematic approaches less concerned with issues of authority and authorship. As such the collection is a testimony to the variety, complexity, and adaptability of 'allegory' at the heart of medieval western civilisation.

Even after “allegory studies” develops as a discipline in its own right, what allegory is and what allegory means is still a contentious issue. This conference aims to address 20th century and contemporary theoretical applications for allegory, most notably in the work of Walter Benjamin and Paul De Man, and contrast them with the voices of scholars who consider this allegory a misinterpretation of a historically bound category.

Seeing across Disciplines: The Book of Selected Readings 2022

Throughout the history of civilizations, the language of visual art has expressed the hidden concepts under the apparent forms and the invisible deduced through the visible. Furthermore, this process takes place through various mediums to convey complex and abstract ideas and meanings through symbols, allegories, and metaphors. Additionally, all those mediums represent hidden meaning and veiled language, a meticulously packaged lesson ready to reveal itself. This research will provide a new method of seeing and interpreting the creative experience of visual art from many aspects by monitoring and studying the development of symbolic thinking through theories of reading, receiving, and interpretation. This, in turn, requires the necessity of dealing with the artwork as a concept and not just looking at its formal aspects only. Thus, this calls for a reconsideration of visual and conceptualism metaphors and tropes in artists' practices, using metaphorical structures as one of the ...

Through a Glass Darkly: Allegory and Faith in Netherlandish Prints from Lucas van Leyden to Rembrandt, 2019

The allegory is too often dismissed as an artificial literary device.At leat one critic admits that allegories arise spontaneously and the consequence of their generation are not subject to the full control of the conscious mind . In the case of inquiries concerning the paperback version of this document please use the message facility indicated by an envelope

The Vitality of Allegory. Figural Narrative in Modern and Contemporary Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State University Press 2012. 296 pp. Hardcover USD 41.95. ISBN 978-0814211823

Belgrade English Language and Literature Studies

Allegory is one of the distinguishing marks of many great works of literature. Over many centuries and cultures, authors have conveyed many symbolic messages about human life and the quest for religious faith in terms of different earthly trials and tribulations. These allegorical messages are closely linked, nonetheless, with many embodied conceptual metaphors that motivate different contemporary modes of thinking and language (e.g., life is a journey). My argument in this article is that literary allegory also has an important connection to our fundamental "allegorical impulse", in which humans automatically seek connections between the physical here and now with larger symbolic life themes. Allegory is a way we live, and seek meaning within our daily lives, that frequently gets elaborated upon in great works of literature.

Language and Literature

For the last 200 years in literary aesthetics a radical opposition has been drawn between allegory and symbol, though no opposition like this was drawn previously. Allegory has generally been regarded as inferior to symbol, supposedly being arbitrary and mechanical where symbol was motivated and imaginative. Although more recently post-structuralists have praised allegory over symbol, they have still believed that it is radically arbitrary. In fact, allegory and symbol are both large-scale expressions of conceptual metaphor and as such are both equally motivated and equally suggestive in meaning. The illusion of a radical opposition between them is to be explained by the ideological self-interest of literary and artistic intellectuals.

2020

For the last 200 years in literary aesthetics a radical opposition has been drawn between allegory and symbol, though no opposition like this was drawn previously. Allegory has generally been regarded as inferior to symbol, supposedly being arbitrary and mechanical where symbol was motivated and imaginative. Although more recently post-structuralists have praised allegory over symbol, they have still believed that it is radically arbitrary. In fact, allegory and symbol are both large-scale expressions of conceptual metaphor and as such are both equally motivated and equally suggestive in meaning. The illusion of a radical opposition between them is to be explained by the ideological self-interest of literary and artistic intellectuals.