Allegory
An allegory is a literary device in which characters, events, and settings symbolically represent abstract ideas or moral qualities. Through this symbolic representation, allegories often convey deeper meanings and moral lessons. They are commonly used to explore complex themes and provide social or political commentary in literature.
8 Key excerpts on "Allegory"
eBook - ePub- Craig L. Blomberg(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- IVP Academic(Publisher)
...By moving away from a generalizing summary of a parable’s meaning to the very situation-specific approach of Dodd and Jeremias, interpreters of the parables, without realizing it, already approached the border of allegorical interpretation. 2. The views that Allegory is equivalent to metaphor extended to narrative and that it may contain many or few points of comparison are widely acknowledged. The following definitions are fairly technical, but they serve to illustrate the different ways in which this definition of Allegory may be expressed. For Michael Murrin, Allegory is a specific kind of analogy in which the author “expresses a truth he has received in contemplation through the medium of tropological figures.” [83] Beatrice Batson explains more specifically, “Allegory. . . may be perceived then as the embodiment of beliefs in concrete form. It is a work in which the author imitates external actualities and at the same time suggests the significance of such imitations by extending a central metaphor and by showing additional analogies.” [84] More technical still is the definition of Gayatri Spivak: “the setting up of a double structure, one component of which is a metasemantic system of significance corresponding to the other component—a system of signs present in the text itself.” [85] In other words, when certain details in a narrative stand for something other than themselves or point to a second level of meaning, especially in the moral or spiritual realm, Allegory is present. [86] A related point, which is rarely disputed, involves the spectrum or continuum of various degrees of allegorical writing that may be found in any given work. Though not always expressed in as much detail as Graham Hough’s “allegorical circle” (see fig. 1.1 in chap. 1 earlier), most recent studies emphasize that some allegories have a greater percentage of details with metaphorical referents than others...
- Isabel Rivers(Author)
- 2003(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...12 Allegory The term Allegory (Greek) comes from classical rhetoric, and means literally saying one thing to mean another. Plutarch says in How the Young Man Should Study Poetry (19e) that it replaced an older term: hyponoia or deep meaning. It was defined in classical times and in the Renaissance primarily as a trope, a figure of speech. Quintilian states: ‘Allegory…either presents one thing in words and another in meaning, or else something absolutely opposed to the meaning of the words. The first type is generally produced by a series of metaphors’ (Education of an Orator VIII vi 44). The idea that Allegory is a continued metaphor is a Renaissance commonplace; for example, Henry Peacham in The Garden of Eloquence compares metaphor to a star, and Allegory to a constellation of stars. However, although Allegory is a rhetorical term, it should not be regarded solely or even chiefly as a matter of technique. Despite the traditional rhetorical definition it has much wider implications. Allegory has its origins in a religious frame of mind, which sees nature and history as charged with hidden divine meanings that can be revealed to the diligent seeker, and it manifests itself both as a method of interpreting texts and as a method of writing. The tendency to see Allegory simply as a technical device has resulted in some attempts to elevate symbolism at the expense of Allegory. C.S.Lewis’s definition in The Allegory of Love of symbolism as a mode of thought and Allegory as a mode of expression reflects this tendency. But Allegory is much more flexible than this definition suggests. On the one hand it is associated with general terms like myth, symbol, parable and fable, and on the other with more restricted terms like metaphor, conceit and emblem. Allegory was first practised in antiquity not as a method of writing but as a method of reading texts...
eBook - ePub- ItaMac Carthy(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Balbi adds that the two senses in play in Allegory should be categorically opposite, or at least different, as is not the case for metaphor. Allegory is both a figure in itself and a genus comprising seven species that exhibit instances of ‘speaking other’, among them irony, enigma and proverbial sayings. So far, Balbi’s technical sense of Allegory may be traced back through various medieval handbooks to Cicero and Quintilian, though he is consistently careful to bring Biblical language within the norms of classical rhetoric and employs a distinctly more pedagogically systematic mode of presentation. 5 This exposition is then immediately followed by a quotation from Bede that explains the allegorical use of words and the allegorical significance of actions as they were exemplified in parallels between the Old and New Testaments. This is Allegory in the service of typology, an interpretative method with an already well-established pedigree that explored how the narrative of Christian salvation was symbolically prefigured in the Jewish scriptures. Allegory is the vehicle whereby an enlightened (or well-instructed) reader moves from a literal, incomplete, understanding of a text to one that is deemed to find its full significance in a different context. Allegory in this sense is not a grammatical device knowingly deployed by the writer, but an instrument of exegesis controlled by the recipient. In the passage quoted from Bede, this is far from being a matter of imaginatively perceived congruities. The recipient is himself controlled by the limited number of templates he is instructed to employ: historical reconstruction; typological (also called ‘spiritual’) parallelism; tropological or moral application; and anagogical reference to what is to be expected at the end of time...
eBook - ePubCamus' Literary Ethics
Between Form and Content
- Grace Whistler(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
...Nowadays, the term myth is often used as loosely as to mean ‘common misconception’, that is, the kind of myth that can be ‘busted’. As for the distinction between ‘parable’ and ‘fable’, these two terms are closely related; both can be defined as short stories containing some sort of moral lesson, and both may leave an element of ambiguity so as to engage the reader’s/listener’s imagination. Where they differ, however, is in their characters: the action which can lead to moral or spiritual understanding in parables occurs between humans in realistic situations, whereas fables contain forces of nature or even animals as key players in the didactic narrative. Allegory, on the other hand, often has a more direct representational relation between the elements of the narrative itself and the enclosed moral message. Where parables and fables rely on the imaginary as a didactic tool, allegories are more like extended metaphors with almost a relationship of identity (where X is to Y as A is to B), such as in Plato’s famous ‘Ship of State’ (Plato 2011, 488a–e), wherein the relation between a ruler and a society is taken as comparable to that of a captain to his ship. Theories of symbolism in philosophy are too numerous and contradictory to do justice to here, so I shall adopt a fairly simplistic interpretation of the word ‘ symbol’ in this chapter—that is, an individual object or element used to represent something more profound and conceptual, such as wedding band used to represent commitment. As will be seen over the course of the following chapter, each of these terms has a place in Camus scholarship, but regrettably their distinctions and implications are yet to be fully delineated. This is what I hope to rectify here. Accordingly, Sect. 2 will lay out a theoretical framework for the chapter. Here I draw on Lacoue-Labarthe’s conception of ‘fable’, proposing that the enclosed analysis of philosophical method is similar to the one which I suggest informs Camus’ own...
eBook - ePub- Susanna Morton Braund(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...p.175 14 Allegory 14.1 For my third chapter devoted to the self-consciousness shown by Latin literature I turn to the trope, or figure of speech, called Allegory. Allegory is a term of literary criticism which derives from the Greek word allegoria, ‘saying one thing and meaning another’. The term itself dates from the first century BCE and seems to have replaced an earlier term, hyponoia, which we can readily translate as ‘under-sense’. A modern definition describes Allegory as ‘a trope in which a second meaning is to be read beneath and concurrent with the surface story’. It goes on to distinguish Allegory from metaphor and from parable through the extent of its story, which may connect with the surface narrative, citing as examples The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser (1590–6) and The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan (1678–84). For the Latin professor Quintilian in the first century CE, the relationship between Allegory and metaphor seems to be closer, and he also regards Allegory and irony as interconnected: ‘Allegory’, which is translated in Latin as ‘inversion’, either presents one thing in words and another in meaning or else something at the same time opposite. (Quintilian, Training of the Orator 8.6.44) 14.2 Straight away he gives an example, using Horace Odes 1.14.1–3: The first type is generally produced by a sequence of metaphors, as in: O ship, you will be driven seaward again by fresh Waves. O what are you doing? Bravely make haste to reach Harbour, and the rest of the ode, in which Horace uses a ship to represent the state, storms to represent the civil wars and the harbour to represent peace and cooperation. This Allegory of ‘the ship of state’ was not an invention by Horace. He models this ode, like many others, on the poems of Alcaeus, a Greek lyric poet from Lesbos writing in the sixth century BCE...
...7 MODERN Allegory This last chapter looks at Allegory in some twentieth-century versions, and follows on from insights discussed in chapters 5 and 6. It concludes with discussion of the idea of Allegory, but we cannot hope to arrive at any finality here; we can only think of further questions which need consideration. Modern criticism and practice has extended the arguments of Walter Benjamin and Paul de Man, developing the concept of Allegory as part of a critical vocabulary throughout literary and cultural studies. Some critics, such as James Paxson, have used de Man to reread texts of traditional Allegory to show how these new insights have the potential to disturb earlier ways of reading them (Paxson, 1994). While some approaches have concentrated on Allegory as an element in the content of fiction, others have argued that all writing is allegorical, or that no text is free of it (Fletcher, 1964:8). This has been a division which this study has tried to bring out. In his book Metahistory (1973), the historian Hayden White argues that the consciousness of nineteenth-century historians was informed by four strategies, of thinking through the four tropes: metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy and irony. No narrative of history could be empirical, or non-figurative; to write history in narrative form entails working with one of these modes, which in turn structures both thought and narrative. These four terms imply Allegory since each literary mode implies others; the narrative means what it says and is overcoded with another narrative that is dependent upon the choice of trope. White would not, of course, go so far as de Man in the claim that tropes undo narrative. In later writings, White returns to the theme, quoting the philosopher Louis Mink that ‘narratives contain indefinitely many ordering relations, and indefinitely many ways of combining those relations...
eBook - ePubHermeneutics
Principles and Processes of Biblical Interpretation
- Virkler, Henry A., Ayayo, Karelynne(Authors)
- 2007(Publication Date)
- Baker Academic(Publisher)
...Rev. ed. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1994, esp. pp. 60–81. Milton S. Terry. Biblical Hermeneutics. 1883. Reprint, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1974, esp. pp. 276–301. Richard C. Trench. Notes on the Parables of Our Lord. 1886. Reprint, Grand Rapids: Baker, 1948. Allegories Just as a parable is an extended simile, so an Allegory is an extended metaphor. An Allegory differs from a strict parable, as noted earlier, in that a parable typically keeps the story distinct from its interpretation or application, while an Allegory intertwines the story and its meaning. Unlike parables, an Allegory generally includes several points of comparison, not necessarily centered around one focal point. For example, in the parable of the mustard seed (Matt. 13:31–32) the central purpose is to show the spread of the gospel from a tiny band of Christians (the mustard seed) to a worldwide body of believers (the full-grown tree). The relationship between the seed, the tree, the field, the nest, and the birds is casual, and these details acquire significance only in relationship to the growing tree. However, in the Allegory of the Christian’s armor (Eph. 6), there are several points of comparison. Each part of the Christian’s armor is significant, and each is necessary for the Christian to be “fully armed.” Principles for Interpreting Allegories 1. Use historical-cultural, contextual, lexical-syntactical, and theological analyses as with other types of prose. 2. Determine the multiple points of comparison intended by the author by studying the context and the points that he emphasized. L ITERARY A NALYSIS OF A LLEGORY Scripture contains many allegories. The Allegory of Christ as the true vine (John 15:1–17) is analyzed here to show the relationship of the several points of comparison to the meaning of the passage. There are three foci in this Allegory...
eBook - ePubJesus the Hero
A Guided Literary Study of the Gospels
- Leland Ryken(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Lexham Press(Publisher)
...These views have been gradually abandoned during the past four decades, and literary scholars never did accept them. I strongly advise my readers to go with the flow of recent opinion and ignore all claims that the parables are non-allegorical and single-point stories. In this module I will simply show how the parables are allegorical, accompanied by the implications of that for interpretation. The essential principle of Allegory is double meaning: a detail in the story stands for something else at a second level. The surface level is the narrative level; the “other” level is what the parable is actually teaching. If we find ourselves in circles (which are few) where it is an insurmountable barrier to claim that the parables are allegories, all we need to do is use the substitute terms “symbol,” “symbolism,” and “symbolic.” The very word from which we get our word “parable” should settle the question immediately. The root word means “to throw alongside.” That is exactly what Allegory does—it puts a second level of meaning beside the narrative level. Before exploring this further, we will profit from having an example before us. I have chosen a parable that Jesus himself interpreted, namely, the parable of the sower and the soils. The parable and its interpretation by Jesus are recounted in three Gospels, suggesting that it is prototypical of the parables as a whole. In Mark’s account, moreover, Jesus prefaced his interpretation of the Allegory with the comment that if the disciples understand this parable correctly, they will “understand all the parables” (4:13). This proves that Jesus’ interpretation of this parable was paradigmatic for all the parables. It is highly significant, therefore, that Jesus gave every detail in the parable a corresponding “other” meaning...
