Allegory in America surveys the history of American allegorical writing from the Puritans through the period of American romanticism to postmodernism. In a series of theoretical chapters the cultural function of allegory is discussed in relation to the mythology of American exceptionalism. Each theoretical chapter is followed by a chapter that analyzes a specific text or group of texts. Allegorical indeterminacy is seen to produce a literary tradition that both represents and subverts the ideals of American orthodoxy.

"The Language of Allegory examines a body of literature not often treated as a unified genre. Reading a number of texts that are traditionally characterized as allegories and that cover a wide time span, Maureen Quilligan identifies the distinctive generic elements they share. Originally published in 1979, this highly regarded work by a well-known feminist critic and theorist is now available in paperback."--Back book cover

By rethinking contemporary debates regarding the politics of aesthetic forms, Gender and Allegory in Transamerican Fiction and Performance explores how allegory can be used to resolve the "problem" of identity in both political theory and literary studies. Examining fiction and performance from Zoé Valdés and Cherríe Moraga to Def Poetry Jam and Carmelita Tropicana, Sugg suggests that the representational oscillations of allegory can reflect and illuminate the fraught dynamics of identity discourses and categories in the Americas. Using a wide array of theoretical and aesthetic sources from the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean, this book argues for the crucial and potentially transformative role of feminist cultural production in transamerican public cultures.

This book argues that popular feminist fiction provided a key means by which American culture narrated and negotiated the perceived breakdown of American progress after the 1960s. It explores the intersection of two key features of late twentieth-century American culture.

The first book in over twenty-five years devoted solely to allegory and personification in art history, this anthology complements current literary and cultural studies of allegory. The volume re-examines early modern allegorical imagery in light of crucial material, contextual and methodological questions: how are allegories conceived; for whom; and for what purposes? Contributors consider a wide range of allegorical representations in the visual arts and material culture, of both early modern Europe and the colonial "New World" 1400-1800. Essays included here examine paintings, sculpture, prints, architecture and the spaces of public ritual while discussing the process and theory of interpretation, formation of audiences, reception history, appropriation and censorship. A special focus on the medium of the body in visual allegory unites the volume's diverse materials and methods.

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.

Memory, Allegory, and Testimony in South American Theater traces the shaping of a resistant identity in memory, its direct expression in testimony, and its indirect elaboration in two different kinds of allegory. Each chapter focuses on one contemporary playwright (or one collaborative team, in the case of Brazil) from each of four Southern Cone countries and compares the playwrights’ aesthetic strategies for subverting ideologies of dictatorship: Carlos Manuel Varela (memory in Uruguay), Juan Radrigán (testimony in Chile), Augusto Boal and his co-author Gianfrancesco Guarnieri (historical allegory in Brazil), Griselda Gambaro (abstract allegory in Argentina).