Allegorical Bodies begins with the paradoxical observation that at the same time as the royal administrators of late fourteenth and early fifteenth-century France excluded women from the royal succession through the codification of Salic law, writers of the period adopted the female form as the allegorical personification of France itself. Considering the role of female allegorical figures in the works of Eustache Deschamps, Christine de Pizan, and Alain Chartier, as well as in the sermons of Jean Gerson, Daisy Delogu reveals how female allegories of the Kingdom of France and the University of Paris were used to conceptualize, construct, and preserve structures of power during the tumultuous reign of the mad king Charles VI (1380–1422). An impressive examination of the intersection between gender, allegory, and political thought, Delogu’s book highlights the importance of gender to the functioning of allegory and to the construction of late medieval French identity.

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.

"This study of her work confirms that the idea of progress toward the afterlife is a recurrent motif, arising from a personal involvement in the movement of Spiritualism and paralleling the automatic writing passages in The Result of an Experiment (1909), anonymously published by Evelyn and her husband William De Morgan.".

In this study Bardzell unveils the way signification in medieval allegorical narrative depends not on Aristotelian theories of language, but rather on an alternative theory of language, which began with the Stoics and was transmitted through the Middle Ages via grammar theory.

The only form of monumental artistic expression practiced from antiquity to the Enlightenment, allegory evolved to its fullest complexity in Dante's Commedia and Spenser's Faerie Queene. Drawing on a wide range of literary, visual, and critical works in the European tradition, Gordon Teskey provides both a literary history of allegory and a theoretical account of the genre which confronts fundamental questions about the violence inherent in cultural forms. Approaching allegory as the site of intense ideological struggle, Teskey argues that the desire to raise temporal experience to ever higher levels of abstraction cannot be realized fully but rather creates a "rift" that allegory attempts to conceal. After examining the emergence of allegorical violence from the gendered metaphors of classical idealism, Teskey describes its amplification when an essentially theological form of expression was politicized in the Renaissance by the introduction of the classical gods, a process leading to the replacement of allegory by political satire and cartoons. He explores the relationship between rhetorical voice and forms of indirect speech (such as irony) and investigates the corporeal emblematics of violence in authors as different as Machiavelli and Yeats. He considers the large organizing theories of culture, particularly those of Eliot and Frye, which take the place in the modern world of earlier allegorical visions. Concluding with a discussion of the Mutabilitie Cantos, Teskey describes Spenser's metaphysical allegory, which is deconstructed by its own invocation of genealogical struggle, as a prophetic vision and a form of warning.

This book explores a neglected feature of intellectual history and literature in the early modern period: the ways in which the body was theorized and represented as an intelligent cognitive agent, with desires, appetites, and understandings independent of the mind. It considers the works of early modern physicians, thinkers, and literary writers who explored the phenomenon of the independent and intelligent body. Charalampous rethinks the origin of dualism that is commonly associated with Descartes, uncovering hitherto unknown lines of reception regarding a form of dualism that understands the body as capable of performing complicated forms of cognition independently of the mind. The study examines the consequences of this way of thinking about the body for contemporary philosophy, theology, and medicine, opening up new vistas of thought against which to reassess perceptions of what literature can be thought and felt to do. Sifting and assessing this evidence sheds new light on a range of historical and literary issues relating to the treatment, perception, and representation of the human body. This book examines the notion of the thinking body across a wide range of genres, topics, and authors, including Montaigne’s Essays, Spenser’s allegorical poetry, Donne’s metaphysical poetry, tragic dramaturgy, Shakespeare, and Milton’s epic poetry and shorter poems. It will be essential for those studying early modern literature, cognition, and the body.

This book analyses cultural questions related to representations of the body in South Asian traditions, human perceptions and attitudes toward the body in religious and cultural contexts, as well as the processes of interpreting notions of the body in religious and literary texts. Utilising an interdisciplinary perspective by means of textual study and ideological analysis, anthropological analysis, and phenomenological analysis, the book explores both insider- and outsider perspectives and issues related to the body from the 2nd century CE up to the present-day. Chapters assess various aspects of the body including processes of embodiment and questions of mythologizing the divine body and othering the human body, as revealed in the literatures and cultures of South Asia. The book analyses notions of mythologizing and "othering" of the body as a powerful ideological discourse, which empowers or marginalizes at all levels of the human condition. Offering a deep insight into the study of religion and issues of the body in South Asian literature, religion and culture, this book will be of interest to academics in the fields of South Asian studies, South Asian religions, South Asian literatures, cultural studies, philosophy and comparative literature.

This book explores the relationship between famous and fictional Caribbean female bodies to literary and historical writing. Through her concentration on the perspectives of women writers, her scrupulous attention to the specific histories of the different islands, her interest in diasporic as well as local writing, her embrace of texts in English, French, and Spanish, her insightful exploration of the poetics of allegory, Maude Adjarian invites us to undertake a fundamental rethinking of the concept of national allegory. This criticism is serious and substantial, scholarly and responsible, but also shrewd, engaging and very refreshing.Ross Chambers, Distinguished University Professor, Emeritus, The University of Michigan Caribbean writers and literary-cultural theorists have traditionally associated the Caribbean archipelago and Caribbeanness with the female body. In so doing, however, they have erased not only the bodies but the social, historical and national experiences of real Caribbean women. Allegories of Desire explores the relationship between famous and fictional Caribbean female bodies to literary and historical writing. By looking at the works of six post-1980 Caribbean women writer—Michelle Cliff, Jamaica Kincaid, Edwidge Danticat, J. J. Dominique, Julia Alvarez and Rosario Ferre—M. M. Adjarian uncovers patterns of female bodily resistance to subordination and oppression. These patterns in turn identify the Caribbean and Caribbeanness with ungendered longings for freedom from the imperial twins of patriarchy and North Atlantic colonialism rather than with an imagined, and ultimately exploited, feminine. This compelling study will shed new light on Caribbean literature.