The Fate of Allegory in the Twentieth Century

Recent theorizing about allegory has, inevitably, taken account of the Romantic legacy of symbolism and its accompanying aesthetic and epistemological assumptions. What we have seen in twentieth-century approaches to allegory is a reversal of the Romantic dismissal of the allegorical genre as lacking authenticity and mystical power. In the work of theorists like Edwin Honig, Angus Fletcher, Gay Clifford, Northrop Frye, Jonathan Culler, Paul de Man and others allegory is situated within a continuum of literary practice. At one end of this spectrum allegory is situated; at the other end we have, variously, verisimilitude or narrative realism (to which allegory is opposed), or symbolism (to which allegory is also opposed) or mythical narratives (to which allegory is assumed to present a significant comparison). Generally, then, in twentieth-century descriptions allegory is not treated as a narrative genre but rather as a style of writing, or ‘symbolic mode’, in Angus Fletcher’s term. The narrative nature of allegory is obscured in favour of a critical emphasis upon the figurative and rhetorical aspects of allegorical texts. A departure from this tendency to devalue the narrative structure of allegory is represented by poststructuralist analyses of the genre. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.