Enlightenment allegory
Creators: name: Gulya, Jason
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2016

description: Allegory is a literary form that teaches through misdirection, telling its readers it is about one thing while actually being about another. It encourages readers to interpret figuratively for religious, political, or moral meanings rather then look only at the narrative’s literal meaning. Enlightenment Allegory argues that the period from about 1660 to about 1750 is especially important for the history of allegory. During this period, allegory adapted to many of the historical and cultural changes accompanying the British Enlightenment—including the increasing authority of empirical epistemology, the gradual spread of secular thinking, and the growing expectation for semiotic transparency. The project’s main argument is that eighteenth-century writers responded to these changes by modalizing the allegorical genre, meaning that they separated the previously indivisible literary form into its components and used those components apart from their original overarching structure. This process of modalization resulted in the coexistence of generic and modal allegory, with some writers approaching it as a self-contained, continuous genre and others as a mode that could be used selectively and discontinuously. Many of the most eminent scholars of allegory contend that it did not survive the transition from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century. Enlightenment Allegory challenges this argument. Enlightenment writers approached allegory not as an obsolete literary form, but as one that could be adapted for an audience becoming increasingly invested in empiricism and secularism—that is, in the here and now—as authoritative ways of understanding the world. But how individual writers adapted allegory in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries varied greatly: some wrote allegories with a degree of concrete detail unprecedented for the form; others used personified abstractions to describe secular, worldly concepts; and others encased allegories within predominantly literal texts. Allegory was a remarkably versatile form that had the potential for being, on the one end of the spectrum, a literary genre that consistently gestured towards ulterior meanings and, on the other end, a mode that could be used intermittently and even mixed with more literal and discursive modes. Enlightenment Allegory consists of two parts, each divided into two chapters. Part I studies the changing role and status of allegory in Restoration England, using John Bunyan and John Dryden as chief examples. Chapter 1 argues that Bunyan responds to the growing authority of empiricism by infusing allegory with an unprecedented amount of concrete detail. This infusion leads Bunyan into a problem. Though empirical and concrete detail is a powerful way to teach his readers about the spiritual realm, it also runs the risk of reinforcing his readers’ tendencies to focus on literal instead of allegorical meaning. Bunyan acknowledges this problem of overinvestment in the literal and responds by, first, connecting his allegories to biblical precedent and, second, including marginal notes that draw the reader’s attentions away from the literal signifiers and towards the allegorical signifieds. Chapter 2 strengthens our understanding of Restoration allegory by shifting to Dryden’s poetry. I argue that Dryden, like Bunyan, helps move allegory in the direction of the empirical and temporal. He does this not by including concrete detail in religious allegories (as Bunyan does), but by using allegory to represent the historical and political. In Absalom and Achitophel Dryden uses the modus operandi of political allegory—which functions by using one set of particular persons or characters to discuss real-life politicians—to discuss the events of the Exclusion Crisis under the guise of retelling the biblical story of Absalom’s rebellion against King David. In The Hind and the Panther Dryden also uses the allegorical form to represent the political and temporal, but in a strikingly different way. He uses the beast fable form, understood at the time as a subsection of allegory, to criticize the Protestants’ demonization of Catholics and to draw attention to the negative political manifestations of Protestant beliefs. Dryden also treats the allegorical beast fable as a mode of writing that can be mixed with more literal and discursive modes, departing significantly from earlier iterations of the form like those of Spenser and Bunyan. Part II brings the analyses of Bunyan and Dryden to bear on eighteenth-century versions of the allegorical form. It looks at how various writers incorporated allegory into their texts, even when those texts were not members of the allegorical genre. Chapter 3 examines how writers incorporated allegory into their satires, using Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of a Tub and Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad as particularly illustrative examples. Both of these two texts, though not allegories themselves, borrowed allegory as a powerful satirical instrument. In Tale of a Tub Swift oscillates between a religious allegory about three brothers—representing the Catholic, Protestant dissenting, and Anglican churches—and digressions that portray allegorical reading in a negative light, asking his readers to find a middle ground between unlicensed allegorical reading that can be used to serve one’s self-interests and superficial reading that misses a text’s hidden meaning. In Dunciad Pope intermingles personified abstractions such as Dulness with real-life individuals, using a traditional convention of allegory without committing fully to the genre. Despite differences between the two texts, both A Tale of a Tub and The Dunciad use allegory intermittently, pushing the form towards being an occasional mode as well as a self-contained genre. Both texts also use the allegorical mode to push against an over-reliance on the concrete and empirical, Tale of a Tub by satirizing the indulgent experiments of the Royal Society and Dunciad by modelling, through the speaker, how to think about history in both abstract and specific terms. Adapting allegory to the eighteenth century does not only mean bringing the form into accordance with emerging interests and investments. It also means using the form to react against those interests and investments. The general shift from generic to modal allegory is not absolute, but rather leads to the coexistence of the two. This is made especially clear in Chapter 4, which focuses on the role played by both generic and modal allegory in eighteenth-century periodical essays. The chapter examines a range of periodical essays written during the period, looking both at how critics discussed allegory and at the uses of allegory in the essays themselves. I argue that Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Samuel Johnson and others bring allegory into accordance with an increasing focus on literary decorum, if we understand this phrase not in the strict, overbearing sense sometimes attributed to the eighteenth century but as denoting a general focus on reception and plausibility and on the congruity of a text’s various components. These writers created aesthetic principles for managing generic and modal allegory and then used specific strategies to satisfy those principles. Enlightenment Allegory ends with a coda focusing on one of Johnson’s aesthetic principles, in particular. Johnson, in his comments on Milton’s Paradise Lost, argues that writers should separate allegorical figures from literal characters when using modal allegory by making allegorical figures immaterial and literal character material. His argument is typical of contemporary criticism in its insistence that writers should properly distinguish between the literal and the allegorical. My manuscript will make significant contributions not only to the field of allegory studies, but to our understanding of genre theory during the British Enlightenment. It argues against the kind of literary history that associates the transformation of traditional genres like allegory with the demise of those genres. In many ways, allegory is a test case: studying its transformation throughout the Enlightenment yields insights into how the period’s writers approached a literary genre that many associated with the religious and political worldviews of medieval and early modern culture. Enlightenment writers were tremendously resourceful in picking and choosing components from traditional literary genres, treating them not only as genres in and of themselves but as modes that could be used within existing and emerging genres. Far from fading away, traditional literary forms persisted through changing literary and historical conditions.