This lively and innovative work treats a body of literature not previously regarded as a unified genre. Offering comparative readings of a number of texts that are traditionally called allegories and that cover a wide time span, Maureen Quilligan formulates a vocabulary for talking about the distinctive generic elements they share. The texts she considers range from the twelfth-century De planctu naturae to Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, and include such works as Le Roman de la Rose, Langland's Piers Plowman, Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, Melville's Confidence Man, and Spenser's Faerie Queene. Whether or not readers agree with this book, they will enjoy and profit from it.

This important theoretical work by Paul de Man sets forth a mode of reading and interpretation based on exemplary texts by Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. The readings start from unresolved difficulties in the critical traditions engendered by these authors, and they return to the places in the text where those difficulties are most apparent or most incisively reflected upon. The close reading leads to the elaboration of a more general model of textual understanding, in which de Man shows that the thematic aspects of the texts--their assertions of truth or falsehood as well as their assertions of values--are linked to specific modes of figuration that can be identified and described. The description of synchronic figures of substitution leads, by an inner logic embedded in the structure of all tropes, to extended, narrative figures or allegories. De Man poses the question whether such self-generating systems of figuration can account fully for the intricacies of meaning and of signification they produce. Throughout the book, issues in contemporary criticism are addressed analytically rather than polemically. Traditional oppositions are put in question by a rhetorical analysis which demonstrates why literary texts are such powerful sources of meaning yet epistemologically so unreliable. Since the structure which underlies this tension belongs to language in general and is not confined to literary texts, the book, starting out as practical and historical criticism or as the demonstration of a theory of literary reading, leads into larger questions pertaining to the philosophy of language. "Through elaborate and elegant close readings of poems by Rilke, Proust's Remembrance, Nietzsche's philosophical writings and the major works of Rousseau, de Man concludes that all writing concerns itself with its own activity as language, and language, he says, is always unreliable, slippery, impossible....Literary narrative, because it must rely on language, tells the story of its own inability to tell a story....De Man demonstrates, beautifully and convincingly, that language turns back on itself, that rhetoric is untrustworthy."--Julia Epstein, Washington Post Book World "The study follows out of the thinking of Nietzsche and Genette (among others), yet moves in strikingly new directions....De Man's text, almost certain to be endlessly provocative, is worthy of repeated re-reading."--Ralph Flores, Library Journal "Paul de Man continues his work in the tradition of 'deconstructionist criticism, '... which] begins with the observation that all language is constructed; therefore the task of criticism is to deconstruct it and reveal what lies behind. The title of his new work reflects de Man's preoccupation with the unreliability of language. ... The contributions that the book makes, both in the initial theoretical chapters and in the detailed analyses (or deconstructions) of particular texts are undeniable."--Caroline D. Eckhardt, World Literature Today

Structures of Appearing: Allegory and the Work of Literature is an interdisciplinary study that revises the history of allegory through a phenomenological approach. The book also takes on the history of aesthetics as an ideology that has long subjugated literature (and art generally) to criteria of judgment that are philosophical rather than literary.

By acknowledging interpretive theories of the past, Brittan provides a proper historical frame of reference in which today's student can better understand figurative language in poetry.

First published in 1970, this book examines the use of allegory in religious, philosophical and literary texts. It traces the development of the device over time demonstrating its evolution from the transmission of myths and religious beliefs to a literary device.

"Thinking Allegory Otherwise is a unique collection of essays by allegory specialists and other scholars who engage allegory in exciting new ways." "Not limited to an examination of literary texts and works of art, the essays focus on a wide range of topics, including architecture, philosophy, theater, science, and law. Indeed, all language is allegorical. This collection proves the truth of this statement, but more importantly, it shows the consequences of it. To think allegory otherwise is to think otherwise-forcing us to rethink not only the idea of allegory itself, but also the law and its execution, the literality offigurative abstraction, and the figurations upon which even hard science depends." --Book Jacket.

In medieval allegory, Body and Soul were often pitted against one another in debate. In Body Against Soul: Gender and Sowlehele in Middle English Allegory, Masha Raskolnikov argues that such debates function as a mode of thinking about psychology, gender, and power in the Middle Ages. Neither theological nor medical in nature, works of sowlehele (“soul-heal”) described the self to itself in everyday language—moderns might call this kind of writing “self-help.” Bringing together contemporary feminist and queer theory along with medieval psychological thought, Body Against Soul examines Piers Plowman, the “Katherine Group,” and the history of psychological allegory and debate. In so doing, it rewrites the history of the Body to include its recently neglected fellow, the Soul. The topic of this book is one that runs through all of Western history and remains of primary interest to modern theorists—how “my” body relates to “me.” In the allegorical tradition traced by this study, a male person could imagine himself as a being populated by female personifications, because Latin and Romance languages tended to gender abstract nouns as female. However, since Middle English had ceased to inflect abstract nouns as male or female, writers were free to gender abstractions like “Will” or “Reason” any way they liked. This permitted some psychological allegories to avoid the representational tension caused by placing a female soul inside a male body, instead creating surprisingly queer same-sex inner worlds. The didactic intent driving sowlehele is, it turns out, complicated by the erotics of the struggle to establish a hierarchy of the self's inner powers.