Sacred Allegories Or Allegorical Poems

Explores the intersection of spirituality and violence in Old English poetry using contemporary approaches

Excerpt from The Famous Allegories: Selections and Extracts for Reading and Study This custom of allegorical interpretation was at once the cause and the result of the universal taste for allegorical compositions a taste which for a time modified the whole texture of European literature. To be able to represent one thing under the similitude of another, to personify the passions and the abstract qualities of the human mind, to give corporeal existence to the virtues and vices, came to be regarded as an exhibition of the highest forms of literary workmanship. For two centuries and a half the most popular of all writings was the allegory. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

By acknowledging interpretive theories of the past, Brittan provides a proper historical frame of reference in which today's student can better understand figurative language in poetry.

Literary allegory has deep roots in early reading and interpretation of Scripture and classical epic and myth. In this substantial study, Mindele Treip presents an overview of the history and theory of allegorical exegesis upon Scripture, poetry, and especially the epic from antiquity to the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, with close focus on the Renaissance and on the triangular literary relationship of Tasso, Spenser, and Milton. Exploring the different ways in which the term allegory has been understood, Treip finds significant continuities-within-differences in a wide range of critical writings, including texts of postclassical, patristic and rabbinical writers, medieval writers, notably Dante, Renaissance theorists such as Coluccio Salutati, Bacon, Sidney, John Harrington and rhetoricians and mythographers, and the neoclassical critics of Italy, England and France, including Le Bossu. In particular, she traces the evolving theories on allegory and the epic of Torquato Tasso through a wide spectrum of his major discourses, shorter tracts and letters, giving full translations. Treip argues that Milton wrote, as in part did Spenser, within the definitive framework of the mixed historical-allegorical epic erected by Tasso, and she shows Spenser's and Milton's epics as significantly shaped by Tasso's formulations, as well as by his allegorical structures and images in the Gerusalemme liberata. In the last part of her study Treip addresses the complex problematics of reading Paradise Lost as both a consciously Reformation poem and one written within the older epic allegorical tradition, and she also illustrates Milton's innovative use of biblical "Accommodation" theory so as to create a variety of radical allegorical metaphors in his poem. This study brings together a wide range of critical issues—the Homeric-Virgilian tradition of allegorical reading of epic; early Renaissance theory of all poetry as "translation" or allegorical metaphor; midrashic linguistic techniques in the representation of the Word; Milton's God; neoclassical strictures on Milton's allegory and allegory in general—all of these are brought together in new and comprehensive perspective.

Distinguishing figural or typological allegory—a method adapted from the Christian exegesis of the Old Testament—from the broader Hellenistic concept of allegory, this book examines its use in representative poems of early Hispanic literature. The author focuses on the thematic and structural employment of this originally nonliterary device and comments on the literary problems it posed and the artistic effects which were achieved by it. The development of this particular allegorical method in medieval Hispanic literature—works in Spanish, Portuguese, Galician, and Catalan—he shows, was fully equal to that found in the medieval Latin, Italian, and English literatures, and an understanding of its use serves to clarify the interpretation of many individual poems.