Literal and allegorical readings
1. Classical and medieval allegory
Piers Plowman and medieval interest in allegory
2. Medieval and Renaissance personification
Allegories, virtues and vices
3. From allegory to symbolism
Coleridge and German Romanticism
4. Allegory in the age of realism
Hawthorne, Melville, Dickinson
Courbet's 'real allegory'
Urban Allegory: Dickens and Marx
5. Walter Benjamin: allegory versus symbolism
Baroque allegory and Milton
6. Allegory, irony, deconstruction
From Benjamin to Paul de Man
'The Rhetoric of Temporality'
Allegory in postcolonialism
Allegory versus personification