The Cambridge Companion to Allegory

by Rita Copeland (Editor), Peter T. Struck (Editor)

Allegory is a vast subject, and its knotty history is daunting to students and even advanced scholars venturing outside their own historical specializations. This Companion will present, lucidly, systematically, and expertly, the various threads that comprise the allegorical tradition over its entire chronological range. Beginning with Greek antiquity, the volume shows how the earliest systems of allegory developed in poetry dealing with philosophy, mystical religion, and hermeneutics. Once the earliest histories and themes of the allegorical tradition have been presented, the volume turns to literary, intellectual, and cultural manifestations of allegory through the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The essays in the last section address literary and theoretical approaches to allegory in the modern era, from reactions to allegory in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to reevaluations of its power in the thought of the twentieth century and beyond.

Genres: Nonfiction, Philosophy

324 pages, Hardcover

First published March 25, 2010

Reviews

[a]

A very useful and accessible introduction to literary theories of allegory. The introduction is great, and the chapter on Walter Benjamin as well. For me the highlight of the book is Daniel Boyarin's piece "Origen as theorist of allegory: Alexandrian contexts," which argues that Christian Logos theology arises as a solution to various hermeneutical/epistemological problems which arise from Platonism. Origen directs us to never to consume texts raw, but always to roast them "with fire."

[Clyde Macalister]

When I purchased this volume, I anticipated that I would ascribe to it a quality of five stars, as I typically have enjoyed the few Cambridge Companions to Literature I've so far read. I award it a four-star review, chiefly on the grounds that much of the details of each chapter implicitly presupposes a bit more prior background knowledge on the part of the reader than might be warranted. I do not consider the format of a general companion to be sufficiently esoteric to warrant otherwise.

That said, it is nevertheless a worthy read overall. I particularly admire the highly refreshing, high-quality writing of each essay's author(s). It is chronologically organized, and while a perusal of it may lead to the perception that it focuses almost exclusively on the history of allegory and only inadequately on any pure theory of allegory, theoretical discussion is embedded within the historical contexts discussed.

Historically, the book covers many important developments in Western and Islamic thought on allegory, and how this influenced and contributed to theology, cultural development, and social critique, from the Homeric period to the post-1960 West. It also does finely in presenting the thought of specific literary figures who contributed to the development of theory of allegory. While I enjoyed all of these, I found the most interesting highlights to include the nature in which Hellenistic scholars preserved Greek pagan mythology largely through allegorical texts, how the Neoplatonists and Christian Church Fathers developed and refined the art into a tradition that lasted well into the Middle Ages, the Roman de la Rose's aid in the further enhancement of the allegorical technique into the Renaissance (and, more specifically, further catalyzed the use of allegory in more secular contexts than had prior been standard), the Romantic period's use of allegory to promote both its political goals and its exaltation of nature, and Walter Benjamin's theory concerning allegory.

I've not read it yet, but I assume, based on the bibliography, that a good supplementary volume to this book is Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode by Angus Fletcher. Read the two of them – which one should take to mean and include the detailed timeline of allegory presented in the front pages of the companion – and readers should expect to be as informed as laymen can be on the subject.