Allegory as Experiential Communication: Metaphorical Mapping between Bunyan’s Emotions and The Pilgrim’s Progress

John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) is a classic example of allegory. While literary critics tend to minimize allegory’s value as a mode, The Pilgrim’s Progress demonstrates a proclivity for genre-transcending techniques that encourage looking at allegory in a new light. Namely, parallels between The Pilgrim’s Progress and Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1660) show Bunyan drawing on deep personal emotion to fuel characterization

Luis Goytisolo’s \u3cem\u3eLa paradoja del ave migratoria\u3c/em\u3e as Postmodern Allegory: A Critique of Absolutism

Luis Goytisolo’s short work of fiction, La paradoja del ave migratoria, was published in 1987 in a Post-Franco Spain and a Postmodern world. I will investigate this unusual novel as a postmodern allegory, relying on Brian McHale’s assertion that postmodern allegory challenges the “unequivocalness of traditional allegories” by problematizing the naive assumption that abstract concepts can be communicated transparently through language (1987, 141). Luis Goytisolo populates his allegory with mythical, and historical characters that hail from a dizzying array of time periods, creating a heterotopic universe in which no one context of references serves as the key to interpretation. Characters are lifted out of familiar situations, and readers are prevented from making automatic associations and must read these characters and contexts without recourse to one absolute paradigm

Navigating Tolkien’s Spatial Allegory

Tolkien’s vast and detailed legendarium has helped pave the way for the fantasy genre as we know it today. His wide variety of characters, detailed maps, and the rich history3 of Middle Earth have all undoubtedly provided inspiration to many modern writers, and continue to hold the interest of both new and old fans of his works. Within his world of Middle Earth, Tolkien has written about thousands of years’ worth of history, and has created for each of his imagined races its own culture and language. However, despite the unique differences of Middle Earth when compared to our own world, many of Tolkien’s key beliefs, such as his close ties to Christianity, have clearly manifested within his legendarium. While the inhabitants of Middle Earth operate under a divine system more like the Greek or Norse pantheon, there are clear Christian elements to his world. Even the physical landscape of Middle Earth, both in the early years of the First Age, and later on in the Third Age, seem to reflect the duality of the Christian concepts of good and evil. Tolkien seems to have set up a world in which intrinsically good things are closer to Heaven, and therefore closer to the Christian concept of God, whereas bad things often dwell underground, closer to the Christian ideas of Satan and Hell. Within the expanse of this spatial allegory that Tolkien has created, the residents of Middle Earth are able to move about in unique ways, and there seems to be a direct relationship between one’s physical elevation and their moral standing at that point in the story. This paper will seek to establish and analyze the allegory created within Tolkien’s legendarium, including its relationship to several key Christian elements, as well as observe a few specific instances of how character morality is directly reflected in their movement. By looking at character movements, and even the physical topography of Middle Earth, with Tolkien’s Christian beliefs in mind, readers can gain a greater understanding of the different ways Tolkien illustrates good and evil within his legendarium, as well as detect similarities between the ultimate fates of morally good and bad characters in the legendarium and keep figures in the Bible

Cultural relativism in the Poisonwood Bible

In her novel The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver explores this same ethnocentric missionary zeal when critiquing the ways in which Western countries relate to “foreign” countries. She creates an allegory where the Price Family and the Congolese people are a microcosm of the United States and its relations to “foreign” countries. In this allegory, Kingsolver suggests that the attempt of the U.S. to change what it does not understand can be detrimental and unethical – that the attempt to spread an ethical system becomes the most unethical idea of all

To Ruin the Repairs: Milton, Allegory, Transitional Justice

International legal theorists posit historical moments when conceptions of justice are “constituted by, and constitutive of, the transition” (Teitel). This article uses the framework of transitional justice to understand the cultural work of political allegory in the spring of 1660 on the eve of the English Restoration. Insights from transitional justice (1.) help explain how Anglican royalists convinced wary Presbyterians to assent to a restoration of the monarchy; (2.) permit a new reading of Milton’s allegory of Sin and Death in Paradise Lost; and (3.) facilitate a more critical history of the framework of transitional justice itself

The Two-Headed Beast: Notes toward the Definition of Allegory

The author provides a literary history of the concept of allegory going back to Homer, describing “allegorism” and “typology” as the two divisions of allegory, distinguishing allegory from symbolism and conceit, exploring modern attitudes toward allegory, and briefly examining the use of allegory and symbol in Tolkien, Lewis, and Williams