Allegories Of One S Own Mind

Perhaps because major Victorians like Thomas Carlyle and Matthew Arnold proscribed Romantic melancholy as morbidly diseased and unsuitable for poetic expression, critics have neglected or understated the central importance of melancholy in Victorian poetry. Allegories of One's Own Mind re-directs our attention to a mode that Arnold was rejecting as morbid but also acknowledging when he disparaged the widely current idea that the highest ambition of poetry should be to present an allegory of the poet's own mind. This book shows how early Victorian poets suffered from and railed against what they perceived to be a "disabling post-Wordsworthian melancholy"-we might refer to it as depression-and yet benefited from this self-absorbed or love-obsessed state, which ironically made them more productive. David G. Riede argues that the dominant thematic and formal concerns of the age, in fact, are embodied in the ambivalence of Carlyle, Arnold, and others, who pitted a Victorian ideology of duty, rationality, and high moral character against a still compelling Romantic cultivation of the deep self intuited as melancholy. Such ambivalence, in fact, is in itself constitutive of melancholy, long understood as the product of conscience raging against inchoate desire, and it constitutes the mood of the age's most important poetry, represented here in the major works of Alfred Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and even in the notoriously "optimistic" Robert Browning. David G. Riede is professor of English at The Ohio State University.

"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.

This book is a three-part journey into the rabbit hole we call the nature of reality. Its ultimate destination is a plausible, living validation of transcendence. Each of its three parts is like a turn of a spiral, exploring recurring ideas through the prisms of religious myth, truth and belief, respectively. With each turn, the book seeks to convey a more nuanced and complete understanding of the many facets of transcendence. Part I puts forward the controversial notion that many religious myths are actually true; and not just allegorically so. Part II argues that our own inner storytelling plays a surprising role in creating the seeming concreteness of things and the tangibility of history. Part III suggests, in the form of a myth, how deeply ingrained belief systems create the world we live in. The three themes, myth, truth and belief, flow into and interpenetrate each other throughout the book.

Jason Crawford explores the emergence of modernity by investigating the early modern poetics of allegorical narrative. He focuses on four major allegorical narratives produced in the period: William Langland's Piers Plowman, John Skelton's The Bowge of Courte, Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, and John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress.

This is a theoretical study of human metamorphosis in Western literature.

Antes de dedicarse por completo a la literatura, T.S. Eliot fue un serio estudiante de filosofía. Este estudio pretende determinar la importancia de este hecho en su desarrollo como crítico literario. La intención es argumentar que el cambio que Eliot hizo de la filosofía a la literatura fue instigado con la esperanza de encontrar en el campo literario un estilo que había vencido durante sus estudios filosóficos.

Anyone who has ever said one thing and meant another has spoken in the mode of allegory. The allegorical expression of ideas pervades literature, art, music, religion, politics, business, and advertising. But how does allegory really work and how should we understand it? For more than forty years, Angus Fletcher's classic book has provided an answer that is still unsurpassed for its comprehensiveness, brilliance, and eloquence. With a preface by Harold Bloom and a substantial new afterword by the author, this edition reintroduces this essential text to a new generation of students and scholars of literature and art. Allegory puts forward a basic theory of allegory as a symbolic mode, shows how it expresses fundamental emotional and cognitive drives, and relates it to a wide variety of aesthetic devices. Revealing the immense richness of the allegorical tradition, the book demonstrates how allegory works in literature and art, as well as everyday speech, sales pitches, and religious and political appeals. In his new afterword, Fletcher documents the rise of a disturbing new type of allegory--allegory without ideas.