Reinventing Allegory

An 1997 examination of allegory in theory and literary practice over four hundred years, and its relationship to Romanticism.

Theresa M. Kelley (Author)

9780521157773, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 9 December 2010

364 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm, 0.53 kg

Review of the hardback: 'Readers concerned with this still crucial element of literary and artistic practice will find a great deal within this book which is stimulating, original and worthy of further investigation.' Romanticism

First published in 1997, Reinventing Allegory asks how and why allegory has survived as a literary mode from the late Renaissance to the postmodern present. Three chapters on Romanticism, including one on the painter J. M. W. Turner, present this era as the pivotal moment in allegory's modern survival. Other chapters describe larger historical and philosophical contexts, including classical rhetoric and Spenser, Milton and seventeenth-century rhetoric, Neoclassical distrust of allegory, and recent theory and metafiction. By using a series of key historical moments to define the special character of modern allegory, this study offers an important framework for assessing allegory's role in contemporary literary culture.

1. Introduction
2. Allegory, phantasia and Spenser
3. 'Material phantasms' and 'allegorical fancies'
4. Allegorical persons
5. Romantic ambivalences I
6. Romantic ambivalences II
7. J. M. W. Turner's 'Allegoric shapes'
8. Allegory and Victorian realism
9. Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]