![]() ![]() Say ‘ Chronicles of Narnia’ or ‘ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’ and many people will say, ‘Oh, the C. As with Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, each of these features in Bunyan’s book carries a double meaning or significance: Christian is both a character in the book and every Christian man.Ĭuriously, though, perhaps one of the most famous examples of ‘allegory’ in English literature isn’t allegory at all – at least, not according to its author. #Allegory sononym series#The allegorical meaning of all this is clear: each Christian must overcome a series of obstacles or tests before being ready for heaven, and such vices or challenges as religious doubt (allegorically represented by the castle) and vanity (given physical embodiment at Vanity Fair – which, of course, gave its name to a Thackeray novel and a US magazine). The book charts Christian’s journey, or pilgrimage, from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City, via such locales as the Slough of Despond, Doubting Castle, and Vanity Fair. Christian, the protagonist of the book, represents the average Christian, as his name implies. Sometimes called the first novel in English, The Pilgrim’s Progress is one of the most famous examples of allegory in all of English literature. Then, in the 1670s, the Baptist preacher and writer John Bunyan published a work which is in some ways the prose response to Spenser’s allegory: The Pilgrim’s Progress. So Spenser’s characters are allegorical because they have two meanings: their surface meaning (the Red-Cross Knight is a knight on a quest) and their secondary meaning (this knight represents the quality of holiness or religious virtue). Spenser’s ambitious, unfinished work is an example of allegory because the characters in the poem represent particular virtues or vices: the Red-Cross Knight (pictured below right with Una) represents Holiness, for instance, while Archimago represents Hypocrisy. In the 1590s, Edmund Spenser wrote his vast epic poem The Faerie Queene. Let’s start with a couple of early examples: one from the world of epic poetry and one from prose (indeed, a work often regarded as the first English novel). So, now we know what an allegory is, let’s consider some examples. But there’s a bit more to unpack here, so let’s press on with the introduction… ![]() To write or speak allegorically is to write or speak about something through referring to something else, which stands as an extended symbol for that original topic. ![]() The word ‘allegory’ is derived from the ancient Greek meaning ‘speaking otherwise’, which makes sense, given the meaning of the term. What is an allegory? And what examples of allegory are there in English literature? An allegory is, put simply, a story that has a double meaning: as The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory puts it, an allegory has a primary or surface meaning, but it also has a secondary or under-the-surface meaning. ![]()
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