Allegory

Introduction

Allegory and meaning

Allegory and abstraction

Literal and allegorical readings

1. Classical and medieval allegory

Allegoresis

Beginning allegory

Dante: fourfold allegory

The veil of allegory

Allegory and 'Figura'

Piers Plowman and medieval interest in allegory

2. Medieval and Renaissance personification

Bronzino's Allegory

Defining personification

Allegories, virtues and vices

Allegory and realism

Allegory and Chaucer

Spenser

3. From allegory to symbolism

Emblems and allegory

Emblems and signs

Bunyan

Blake

Coleridge and German Romanticism

4. Allegory in the age of realism

Hawthorne, Melville, Dickinson

Identity and monstrosity

Courbet's 'real allegory'

Urban Allegory: Dickens and Marx

Baudelaire

5. Walter Benjamin: allegory versus symbolism

Baroque allegory

Allegory and the skull

Baroque allegory and Milton

6. Allegory, irony, deconstruction

From Benjamin to Paul de Man

'The Rhetoric of Temporality'

Allegories of Reading

Prosopopoeia

Apostrophe

7. Modern allegory

Allegory in postcolonialism

Postmodern allegories

For and against allegory

Allegory versus personification

Glossary.