Everything about Allegory totally explained
An
allegory (from,
allos, "other", and,
agoreuein, "to speak in public") is a figurative mode of
representation conveying a
meaning other than the
literal.
Allegory is generally treated as a figure of
rhetoric, but an allegory doesn't have to be expressed in
language: it may be addressed to the eye, and is often found in realistic
painting,
sculpture or some other form of
mimetic, or representative art.
The
etymological meaning of the word is broader than the common use of the word. Though it's similar to other rhetorical comparisons, an allegory is sustained longer and more fully in its details than a
metaphor, and appeals to
imagination, while an
analogy appeals to
reason or
logic. The
fable or
parable is a short allegory with one definite moral.
Since meaningful stories are nearly always applicable to larger issues, allegories may be read into many stories, sometimes distorting their author's overt meaning. For instance, many people have suggested that
The Lord of the Rings is an allegory for the
World Wars, though it was written well before the outbreak of World War II and in spite of
J. R. R. Tolkien's emphatic statement in the introduction to the second edition "It is neither allegorical nor topical....I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence."
Northrop Frye discussed what he termed a "continuum of allegory", ranging from what he termed the "naive allegory" of
The Faerie Queene, to the more private allegories of modern
paradox literature. In this perspective, the characters in a "naive" allegory are not fully three-dimensional, for each aspect of their individual personalities and the events that befall them embodies some moral quality or other abstraction; the allegory has been selected first, and the details merely flesh it out.
Examples
Allegory has been a favourite form in the
literature of nearly every nation. It represents many tales.
In classical literature two of the best-known allegories are
the cave in
Plato's
Republic (Book VII) and the story of the stomach and its members in the speech of Menenius Agrippa (
Livy ii. 32); and several occur in
Ovid's
Metamorphoses. In Late Antiquity
Martianus Capella organized all the information a fifth-century upper-class male needed to know into an allegory of the wedding of Mercury and
Philologia, with the seven
liberal arts as guests; Capella's allegory was widely read through the Middle Ages.
Medieval thinking accepted allegory as having a
reality underlying any rhetorical or fictional uses. The allegory was as true as superficial facts of surface appearances. Thus, the bull
Unam Sanctam (1302) presents themes of the unity of
Christendom with the pope as its head in which the allegorical details of the metaphors are adduced as
actual facts which take the place of a logical demonstration, yet employing the vocabulary of logic: "
Therefore of this one and only Church there's one body and one head—not two heads as if it were a monster... If, then, the Greeks or others say that they were not committed to the care of Peter and his successors, they
necessarily confess that they're not of the sheep of Christ" .
In the late fifteenth century, the enigmatic
Hypnerotomachia, with its elaborate woodcut illustrations, shows the influence of themed pageants and
masques on contemporary allegorical representation, as
humanist dialectic conveyed them.
Some elaborate and successful specimens of allegory are to be found in the following works, arranged in the approximate chronological order:
Where some requirements of "realism", in its flexible meanings, are set aside, allegory can come more strongly to the surface, as in the work of
Bertold Brecht or
Franz Kafka on one hand, or on the other in science fiction and fantasy, where an element of universal application and allegorical overtones are common, as with
Dune.
Allegorical films include:
Fritz Lang's Metropolis
Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal
Stanley Kubrick's
El Topo
The Matrix
Gojira
The Golden Compass
Some artwoks of allegory include:
Sandro Botticelli – La Primavera (Allegory of Spring)
Albrecht Dürer – Melencolia I
Artemisia Gentileschi – Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting; Allegory of Inclination
Jan Vermeer – The Allegory of Painting
Ambrogio Lorenzetti; "Good Government in the City" and "Bad Government in the City"
The English School's "Allegory of Queen Elizabeth" painted circa 1610.Further Information
Get more info on 'Allegory'.
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