Reinventing Allegory

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

How and why has allegory survived, despite the Romantic critique of it as an outdated and artificial literary mode? This wide-ranging 1997 study of allegory in theory and literary practice from the late Renaissance to the present day argues that Romanticism represented the pivotal moment in allegory's survival.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.