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This thesis represents perhaps the first extensive study of allegorical imagery in general, and emblematics in particular, across the œuvre of W.G. Sebald (1944-2001). In so doing, it seeks to place Sebald in a long, notably Germanophone lineage which can be traced back to the early modern period, though one significantly mediated by the revival of interest in allegorical imagery during the first half of the twentieth century (that of Karl Giehlow, the Warburg school, and Walter Benjamin's idiosyncratic labours thereafter, chiefly in Origin of the German Trauerspiel and The Arcades Project). This thesis apportions equal weight to Sebald's long and short works, the latter of which have often been marginalised or neglected by anglophone critics. In keeping with its dialectic of word and image, the emblem has, from its very inception, fulfilled a dual function: representation and exposition. In addition to the oft-remarked interposition of word and image in his later works, Sebald's writing dating back to the early 1980s betrays a tendency to combine these functions in peculiar ways, a tendency which only intensified over the course of the subsequent decade. In Sebald's later, longer works, the narrator plays a central role in the emblematic staging, so to speak, then in the exposition of such enigmatic images as are made to appear. In that emblematics is constitutionally a reiterative form of expression, a long contextual and theoretical introductory chapter is followed by chapters concentrated on certain of Sebald's most significant emblems: dogs, corpses, and moths and butterflies.

This thesis examines the close relation between political and literary forms integral to the late-nineteenth century 'socialist revival' in Britain (1881-ca. 1906), widely marked by a belief that educationalism and propaganda, or 'making socialists', would be sufficient to realise social transformation. Within the ideological tendency usually called 'ethical' socialism, the matter of such educationalism was predominantly moral and spiritual. By combining the individual moral focus of such 'ethical' socialism with educationalism's emphasis on the social effect of the ideational, a late-Victorian socialist intelligentsia morphed the cultural authority of middle-class intellectualism into the countercultural identity of seemingly 'classless' prophetic pioneers working on behalf of humanity, thus claiming a socialist legitimacy for the literary pursuits of the alienated bourgeois. This middle-class, 'ethical' socialist project ran into two key epistemic dilemmas, as it needed to negotiate the relation between, first, the individualism of its moral focus and the collectivism that powers the renegotiation of class identity; second, between the ideal nature of intellectual work and the material agency claimed for it. The thesis argues that 'ethical' socialists managed both dilemmas through the affordances of literary form. By constructing formal and generic hybrids, they could simultaneously gesture to the individual and the collective, to the ideal and the material. Four case studies of 'ethical' socialist writers provide evidence for this claim. In Chapter One, Edward Carpenter's prose poem Towards Democracy (1883) is analysed in its self-presentation as both prophetic self-expression and the transparent reflection of a collective, extra-literary reality. In Chapter Two, novelist Olive Schreiner is seen to construct a holistic philosophy from the combination of Emersonian Transcendentalism and Darwinian materialism, formally reflected in the socialistically popular allegories of Dreams (1890). The third chapter argues that social theorist Jane Hume Clapperton's novel Margaret Dunmore; or, A Socialist Home (1888) constitutes a hybrid of the socialist utopia and the individualist-realist bourgeois novel that fuses the ideal and the material. The final chapter analyses how three 'ethical' socialist New Woman writers of the 1890s, Katharine Conway, Isabella Ford, and Gertrude Dix, responded to a socialist gendering of the tension between individualism and collectivism by blending the collective symbolic semantics of allegory with the intrinsic individuality of the bourgeois-realist novel. Together, the four case studies show that literary form occupied an epistemically overcharged role within the late-Victorian collocation of class, philosophy, aesthetics, and ideology that was 'ethical' socialism.

The problem this dissertation addresses is at face a simple one: in the very specific case of Hebrews 7.1-3, what interpretive move is the author using to interpret the Old Testament, when he offers a comparison between Jesus and the mysterious figure of Melchizedek? However, the answer quickly becomes complicated due to the inadequacy of our terminology, where "typology" and "allegory" - the most common interpretive moves assigned to Hebrews 7.1-3 in the scholarship - take on medieval or modern meanings rather than definitions available to the ancient authors themselves. This dissertation explores the historical background to figural and non-literal readings of sacred texts, considering in turn Greek, Jewish, and Christian readers. Each group of readers considered provides necessary context for interpretive activity in Hebrews. Greek allegorists provide the idea of a religiously or philosophically encoded text via the Homeric allegorists and their critic Plato. They also provide the actual ancient definition of the term "allegory", as a rhetorical trope involving extended metaphor and poetic hinting by an author, which might include techniques ranging from metonymy to numerology to concept-for-concept substitution. Jewish allegorists - Aristeas, Aristobulus, and Philo - make the distinctive move to seeing a text as encoded not by a human poet like Homer or Orpheus, but by the great divine Author, God. When turning to Christian allegorists, a natural touchstone is Paul - who uses the term allegory in Galatians - but Jesus himself and (Pseudo)-Barnabas also provide very important context for distinctively Christian allegorical reading, particularly involving the Christological fulfilment of hints laid by God in the sacred history of the Old Testament (that is, "typology"). Trajectories in allegorical exegesis in early Christianity are considered, to examine the latent tendencies within the form. Finally, the definitions and understanding gained are turned to use in analysing exegesis in Hebrews, where 7.1-3 - and several other texts - are read against the background of Hellenistic literary allegory.

This thesis considers the relationship between space and allegory in the poetry of Edmund Spenser. It argues that Spenserian allegory is an inherently spatial conceit. In The Faerie Queene, the figurative nature of metaphors seems to be deliberately forgotten, as spatial metaphors take on literal existence. Fairyland reifies ethical concepts, and these reifications tend to possess spatial characteristics 'other to' the 'spatial consequences' of those concepts outside the allegory. I adopt from Christopher Burlinson's instructive earlier study (2006) a Lefebvrian critique of the idea that space signifies like a text. This anticipates the second major claim of the thesis: that taking action in Fairyland is not analogous to reading The Faerie Queene. Spenser's figures are only similar to the poem's readers, rather than simple transpositions of them. The thesis is divided into three parts. The first is about the spatiality of persons. Surveying classical and Renaissance theories of prosopopoeia and contemporary theories of personification, I argue that personification should be considered as a kind of allegory, because of the 'spatial otherness' it entails. In the second part, I examine embodiments of nature, focusing on Spenser's neglected figure of Night, and his famous personification of the world's rivers. I argue that personification exchanges natural motion for human mobility, thus compounding the illegibility of the natural world. The final two chapters examine two locations, caves and houses, by which concepts in Fairyland are reified. I show the spatial distortions effected on ethical concepts by these locations, their characteristics and cultural connotations. The thesis provides extended readings of episodes and motifs in The Faerie Queene which have received very little critical attention. It re-assesses the relationship between reading the poem and action in Fairyland. Its account of allegory as a spatial conceit also adjusts a tendency to pose allegory and space in antithesis.

This PhD thesis explores the conflicting narratological momenta at play in Heliodorus’s Aethiopica (approx. fourth century C.E.) and their relationship to the novel’s irreconcilable ideological impulses. The conception of this novel as a whole is still dominated by the readings of Jack Winkler and John Morgan: the former sees it as a playful work about hermeneutical questions; the latter singles out its teleological drive and moralising side. Developing a narratology of possibilities, the first part of this dissertation argues that both interpretations fundamentally misconceive the Aethiopica’s nature by advocating a single ‘correct’ reading. I demonstrate that this novel is a magic box containing numerous possible narrative scenarios on a broad spectrum, of which a playful and pluralising, on the one hand, and teleological and reductive, on the other hand, mark the extremes. The final chapter of my dissertation ventures into the intellectual landscape of late antiquity: I explore hypothetical interpretations that might emerge if we viewed the Aethiopica from perspectives associated with two non-Christian interpretative communities of its time—rhetorically trained pepaideumenoi and Platonists—that is to say, with their cognitive habits in mind. While the ‘educated’ reading focuses on Heliodorus’s engagement with the Classical past, the Platonist interpretation zooms in on the novel’s allegorical side. From the Aethiopica’s receptivity for these ideologically charged readings, I infer that the novel is a playing field for what I call ‘cognitive identities’ of the late imperial era—by which I mean those elements of social identity that concern methods of information processing. To conclude, my thesis aims to achieve something that has all too often remained an unfulfilled promise in narratologically oriented literary criticism: to bridge the gap between formal analysis and cultural, discursive interpretation.

My thesis has two components: 1) a collection of eighteen original short stories entitled Mayflies, and 2) a critical work, which proposes a definition of the ‘Artifice’ story structure, examines the techniques used by its authors, and reflects on my own Practice as Research. Artifice stories feature one impossible element introduced into an otherwise normative context, whereupon one or more characters adapt to a new fictive universe. The structure was originally proposed by Tzvetan Todorov in The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Todorov does not give a name to the Artifice story; I instead take the term from Ra Page’s introduction to the short story anthology Parenthesis: ‘Some stories have such a high content of artifice or unreality [that] they offer themselves as an immediate sub-species [...] — the ‘Artifice story’ — the archetype of which would have to be Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis’’ (Page, 2006: iv). Page himself borrows the term from Jorge Luis Borges’ use of ‘Artifices’ as the title for Part Two of his collected stories: Fictions (Borges, [1965] 1998: 93-152). My collection of stories forms an original contribution to knowledge as a) original creative works, which intrinsically contribute to the short story corpus; b) experiments in the Artifice story structure, and c) occasionally, to demonstrate what does not qualify as an Artifice story, testing to destruction my proposed definitions. Accordingly, the collection meets the National Association of Writers in Education’s benchmarks for Practice as Research, ‘that the creative writer will undertake this research through the act of creating; that they will invest knowledge and understanding into this practice, and that they will develop their knowledge and understanding through their practice’ (NAWE, 2008). While the Artifice structure recurs in the work of many prominent short fiction writers of the past hundred years (Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Silvina Ocampo, Ted Chiang, Hassan Blasim, et al), it has so far evaded definition and investigation as a distinct form. The critical section of my thesis constitutes an original contribution to knowledge by defining the Artifice structure, by analysing archetypal Artifice stories and their narrative mechanisms, and by considering the form’s sub-species and genre hinterlands. The thesis, as a whole, will address the following questions: What are Artifice short stories? What aren’t Artifice short stories? What are the different kinds of Artifice short stories? How do Artifice stories work, and how do I go about writing them?

Computerised simulated human technologies are often considered to be the gold standard in clinical education, but calls to critically enhance the theoretical and philosophical foundation of this pedagogy have largely been left unanswered. The simulation learning literature is vast, but it is concerned mostly with measuring student outcomes and learning satisfaction, and little is known about how these technologies influence the practices of clinical educators or how professional practice learning is embodied in this complex, contentious, and uncanny space. This thesis explores the ways in which nurse educators enrol computerised simulated human patients into the assemblages within their pedagogical practices. Guided by the sensibilities of actor-network theory (ANT), and Mol's (2002) notion of praxiography, ethnographic observations were undertaken with nurse educators at two nursing schools. The educators wore digital videoglasses to record their teaching practices from their own visual perspective during the observations. In-depth elicitation interviews were held to further explore these practices. The ANT sensibilities of allegory, translation, and multiple worlds guided a posthuman analysis of the assembled materials. The analysis revealed an understanding of the practices of simulation education as being doubly performative. The hybrid assemblages of simulation and educator tell stories that act on multiple levels; simultaneously specific and allegorical, theatrical and practice-focused. These multiple layers of the uncanny are integral to the allegorical practices that must contend with the tension of teaching students to pretend to be nurses while they are learning to become nurses. While professing to enact 'scientific' and evidence-based approaches to teaching, the nurse educators' practices are inextricably bound with storytelling, indicating that the scientific and folkloric are not in binary opposition. Further, the thesis has refined the use of allegory in and beyond ANT-inspired approaches to conceptualise research in education and practice settings.

The 'mechanical arts' or artes mechanicae were first named as a part of Philosophy in Hugh of Saint-Victor's Didascalicon (1120s). They were identified as seven arts (fabric making, armament, commerce, agriculture, hunting, medicine, and theatrics), and positioned as a parallel to the seven liberal arts. Their inclusion in the Didascalicon has been taken by previous historians to signal a new interest in science and engineering, an effort to 'give intellectual status to technology for the first time'. This study reconsiders the significance of the mechanical arts for schoolmen working in northern France in the twelfth century. It argues that while this category designated a set of everyday technologies, it also had a more covert, imaginative currency for certain authors - as an image or exemplum for the process of learning. Its procedures and activities could be held up as a mirror to those of the liberal and especially verbal arts, picturing these in the terms of poiesis - an ancient model for philosophy as 'sense making' or 'world making'. This metaphorical utility of the artes mechanicae can be discerned in Hugh's discussion, running underneath his more literal concern with the mechanical arts as everyday technologies. It was given fullest expression, I argue, in the later allegorical encyclopaedias of 'Chartrian' poets, Bernard Silvestris and Alan of Lille (1140s-80s). The final part of the thesis discusses Geoffrey of Vinsauf's Poetria nova (c. 1215). Here the mechanical arts are enlisted to represent the student of the verbal arts as a technite, a technician and theorist. Geoffrey's work is often considered a summa of medieval thinking about poet-craft. But its recruitment of the mechanical arts to picture theoretical mastery also marks the end - and a reversal - of the lesser-known invocation of mechanica by twelfth-century authors, the one I trace here: which cast the author and scholar as a maker proper, a 'poet' in the ancient sense of that word.

The social fact of movement is a significant underlying feature of early medieval Northumbria, as it is for other regions and other periods. The eighth-century Anglo- Latin hagiographical tradition that centres on Bede (673-735) is not known for its articulacy concerning travel, and what is expressed might well be overlooked for its brevity. This thesis explores the relationship between allegories and symbolism, and the underlying travel-culture in prose histories and hagiographies produced in Northumbria in the early eighth century. It demonstrates the wide extent to which travel was meaningful. The range of connotations applied to movement and travel motifs demonstrate a multi-layered conceptualization of mobility, which is significant beyond the study of travel itself. In three sections, the thesis deals first with the mobility inherent in early medieval monasticism and the related concepts that influence scholarly expectations concerning this travel. The ideas of stabilitas and peregrinatio are explored in their textual contexts. Together they highlight that monastic authors were concerned with the impact of movement on discipline and order within monastic communities. However, early medieval monasticism also provided opportunities for travel and benefitted from that movement. Mobility itself could be praised as a labour for God. The second section deals with how travel was narrated. The narrative role of sea, land, and long-distance transport provide a range of stimuli for the inclusion and exclusion of travel details. Whilst figurative allegory plays its part in explaining both the presence and absence of sea travel, other, more mundane meanings are applied to land transport. Through narratives, those who were unable to travel great distances were given the opportunity to experience mobility and places outside of their homes. The third section builds on this idea of the experience of movement, teasing out areas where a textual embodiment of travel was significant, and those where the contrasting textual experience of travel is illustrative of narrative techniques and expectations. This section also looks at the hagiographical evidence for wider experiences of mobility, outside of the travel of the hagiographical subjects themselves. It demonstrates the transformation of the devotional landscape at Lindisfarne and its meaning for the social reality of movement. This wide-ranging exploration of the theme of mobility encourages the development of scholarship into movement, and into the connections between travel and other aspects of society.

This thesis examines the depiction of warfare in post-9/11 ancient world epics and assesses the extent to which these films engage with contemporary events by means of allegory and analogy. Inspired by scholarship on allegorical and analogous interpretations of 1950s-60s ancient world epics, I explore how the current cycle engages with the American socio-political landscape in the wake of 9/11, with particular emphasis on the War on Terror and ensuing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. I chart the genre’s evolution in relation to the combat film, and examine how the current cycle of ancient world epics integrates the tropes of other genres into its portrayal of warfare, invasion, occupation and imperialism. Within this context, I explore the recurrent motif of the father-son dynamic, and assess how its use in combat films corresponds to that in ancient world epics. I also discuss how this motif was employed in 1980s Vietnam War films, and what its use in these modern epics suggests about the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Furthermore, I discuss the use of the unreliable narrator to engage with wider debates on the value of historical films compared to written history. The aim of this study is to demonstrate that the ancient world epic is a malleable construct with which filmmakers can engage with the present while depicting the past. I build on existing studies of the ancient world in cinema, contributing new understanding of the current cycle’s relationship to its predecessors, to other genres, and to post-9/11 American society. In so doing this thesis contributes to notions of film as art, as industry, and as history, and how they intersect in cinematic depictions of the ancient world.

This thesis addresses aspects of Romanian society and cinema, by analyzing post-communist films through the perspective of marginality. The central hypothesis of this study refers to the ways in which films illustrate conditions of post-communist Romanian society, as they consider representations of the periphery through the angle of allegories of marginality. Following a long tradition, especially in literary studies, where it refers to the overt insertion of symbolic meanings, allegory refers in this study to a less noticeable delivery, by using a postmodern interpretation of the concept. This translates to detecting a latent meaning in films, by interpreting them in a broader context pertaining both to the film's circumstances (production, distribution and reception), and to the broader framework of the film's content. What connects post-communist Romanian films is a concern for matters of marginality, as they focus on dissensions in society, intergenerational conflicts, youth and limited opportunities of social movement, and the use of satire as a way of handling the bleak conditions of life. Aiming to provide a realistic representation of post-communist life, new wave Romanian films focus on the mundane reality of everyday life. The films discussed in this thesis expand beyond the scope of the new wave, and present a diversity of aesthetic approaches and relating perspectives on allegory—from distinct to obscure—defined by the contextual conditions of post-communism.

This thesis traces the afterlife of the Romance of the Rose in fourteenth-century England. Whether it was closely imitated or only faintly recalled, I argue that the Rose exercised its influence on fourteenth-century English literature in two principal ways. Firstly, in the development of a self-reflexive focus on how meaning is produced and transmitted. Secondly, in a concern with how far the author's intentions can be recovered from a work, and to what extent the author must claim some responsibility for the meaning of a text after its release into the world of readers. In the Rose, many of these issues are presented through the lens of a disordered erotic desire, and questions of licit and illicit textual and sexual pleasures loom large in the later responses. My investigation focuses on four English writers: William Langland, John Gower, the Gawain-Poet, and Geoffrey Chaucer. In my final chapter I suggest that the Rose ceased to be a generative force in English literature in the fifteenth century, and I try to offer some explanations as to why. In examining the influence of the Rose in England I am not trying to suggest a linear transmission of cultural dominance, but rather a complex and plural process of interaction that expands to include texts that both antedate and post-date the Rose - especially Neoplatonic allegories and Ovid, on the one hand, and, on the other, Deguileville and Machaut. The individual English writers I look at are not seen as having a single and stable attitude towards the Rose; instead, I argue, the Rose emerges as a way of thinking about the interaction between texts, how meaning is produced, and how authorial ownership is claimed or refused. Using not only literary evidence but also detailed archival research into the manuscript circulation of the Rose, I question the usefulness of 'English' and 'French' as critical categories for the study of late-medieval literature, and attempt to show that, for a certain kind of literary activity, the Rose occupied a central position in England: not a stable foundation of cultural authority, but a realm of self-questioning subversion and instability.

Edward Bouverie Pusey once towered over nineteenth-century British theology, but he has now fallen into almost entire insignificance. However, analysis of this decline (Chapter 1) leads to a reassessment. His development—especially his complicated relationship with pre-Tractarian High Church Anglicanism—shows a deep criticism of post-Enlightenment intellectual trends, from his early years through his association with the Oxford Movement and the Tracts for the Times, to the end of his life (Chapter 2). This criticism led him to the patristic use of allegory, both as a biblical hermeneutic and as a creative, complex, image-based approach to theology (Chapter 3). His development of High Church theology (seen especially through comparison with Waterland) and his use of allegory can be traced throughout his theology. His understanding of union with Christ and theosis reveals both: the sacraments have a strong symbolic dimension, while his positions on baptismal regeneration and the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist show a development rather than a rejection of earlier High Church theology (Chapters 4 and 5). His understanding of the atonement blends High Church reliance on sacrificial types with his unitive theology to reconfigure traditional satisfaction theory as restoration of love for God, rather than redemption from punishment—a position which marks Pusey as an important transitional figure in 19th c. theology (Chapter 6). The flexibility of Pusey's allegorical approach also allows him to blend a High Church tradition of spiritual sacrifice with sacramental participation in Christ's self-offering, so that sacrifice becomes an aspect of union with Christ (Chapter 7). Pusey's use of allegory shows similarities to postmodern theology, while his development of High Church theology shows his originality (Chapter 8).

The late Middles Ages saw the development in Europe of increasingly complex, ambitious, and self-conscious forms of creative literature. In the works of poets such as Dante, Petrarch and Chaucer new models of authorship and poetic identity were being explored, new kinds of philosophical and aesthetic value attributed to literary discourse. But these creative developments also brought with them new dangers and tensions, a sense of guilt and uncertainty about the value of creative literature, especially in relation to the dominant religious values of late medieval culture. In this thesis I explore how these doubts and tensions find expression in Chaucer’s poetry, not only as a negative, constraining influence, but also as something which contributes to the shape and meaning of poetry itself. I argue that as Chaucer develops his own expansive, questioning poetics in The House of Fame and The Canterbury Tales, he problematises the principle of allegory on which the legitimacy of literary discourse was primarily based in medieval culture and the final fragments of The Canterbury Tales see Chaucer struggling, increasingly, to reconcile the boldness and independence of his poetic vision with the demands of his faith. This struggle, which emerges most strongly and polemically in the final fragments, I argue, runs in subtle and creative forms throughout the whole of Chaucer’s work. By seeing Chaucer in this light as a poet not of fixed, but of conflicted and vacillating intentions – a poet productively caught drawn between ‘game’ and ‘earnest’, radical ironies and Boethian truths – I attempt to account, in a holistic manner, for the major dichotomies that characterise both his work and its critical reception.

This thesis examines the role of readerly engagement in the allegorical poetry of Edmund Spenser and William Blake. An analysis of their poetry reveals important affinities between the two poets. Not only was Blake aware of Spenser’s work, he can be seen to incorporate and build upon Spenser’s self-conscious poetic style in order to engage readers in the active process of interpretation. Meaning in their poetry can be shown to unfold gradually by way of complex interactions between the reader and the text, interactions fostered by the reader’s imagination and the (differently) visual quality of the two poets’ works. Blake promotes this way of seeing as being “four-fold,” the ability to perceive on several dimensions. The first chapter of this thesis looks at the definitions and attitudes towards allegory from the early sixteenth century onwards, showing how the mode has been constantly redefined. Chapter two investigates the self-conscious nature of allegory through an analysis of the placement of words, metaphors, unconventional language, and the way the poems may be read by readers. Both poets encourage a heightened awareness of the process of reading which may be termed allegorical. Blake owned his own printing press allowing him greater control over the words and design of his text. This enabled him to be more forceful in his communication of images and ideas than Spenser. Chapter three focuses upon the multiple (and contradictory) ways in which the text may be interpreted by the reader. Allegory is a means of communicating and simultaneously disguising criticism. Both poets can be seen to use it to voice resistance to forms of authority, even as they encourage readers to recognise these meanings within their texts. Spenser and Blake had to combat different forms of censorship with differing strategies. Whereas Spenser felt compelled to uphold the status quo, Blake sought to deconstruct rigid social conventions. Chapter four explores the relation between allegory and the imagination. Spenser uses allegory to inspire the imagination, whereas for Blake the imagination encourages allegory. The imagination is a means of pushing readers towards further learning and a deeper appreciation of allegorical meaning. Chapter five analyses Spenser and Blake’s verbal and imagistic visuality in relation to allegory. Blake’s illustrations promote further reader engagement, while Spenser’s illuminations are a part of his metaphorical and allegorical text. Both poets use the visual to trigger imaginative readerly interaction and to promote new ways of perceiving and relating to their poems.

Brevard Childs argues for the inner logic of scripture’s textual authority as an historical reality that gives rise to the material condition by which the church apprehends and experiences God in Christ. The church’s use of (or by) scripture thus has a larger interiority: the shaped canon of scripture, Old and New Testaments, is a rule of faith which accrues authority in the church, through the vehicle of the sensus literalis. Childs’ work has been misplaced, however. Part one locates it internationally, attending to the way it has been read in English and German and finding that it has enjoyed a more patient reception in Europe than in Britain or North America. To illustrate, Childs’ definition of biblical theology is contrasted with that of James Barr. Their differences over gesamtbiblische theology involve opposite turns toward and away from Barthian dogma in biblical inquiry. Part two examines Childs on biblical reference, introducing why intertextuality is not midrashic but deictic—pointing to the res. This coincides with an understanding of the formation of biblical literature. Childs’ argument for canonical shaping is juxtaposed with Hermann Gunkel on tradition history, showing “final form” to be a deliberate inversion of form critical principles. Childs’ interest in the Bible as religious literature is then set alongside his studious confrontation of Judaism, with implications for inter-religious dialogue. Barr and Childs are compared again in part three, which frames their respective senses of indirect and direct biblical reference in terms of allegory. Both see allegory at work in the modern world under certain rules (either biblical criticism or the regula fidei). Their rules affect their articulations of trinitarian dogma. Finally, Psalm102 highlights divergences between modern and pre-modern interpreters. If scripture comprehends the present immediately, some postures of the church toward the synagogue may be excluded.

The relationship between the Bible and literature is long-standing and has received increasing attention in recent years. This project investigates the interface between the Bible and literature by focusing on the genre of “parable”. The influence of the Bible on Western literature is considerable, and yet in the case of George MacDonald’s writing it is often overlooked. The “parabolic” is a helpful way to focus our discussion as it is an important genre both in Jesus’ proclamation of the Kingdom of God and more subtly in MacDonald’s fantasy and fairytale writing. It is remarkable that approximately a third of Jesus’ teaching about the Kingdom of God comes in the form of parabolic speech. Rather than serving as a nice illustrative story to a theological point made elsewhere, the actual form of parabolic speech is crucial for the message it seeks to convey. Form and content work together in Jesus’ parables in a unique way to break open the reality depicted in parable. This thesis attempts to investigate a specifically biblical view of “parable” for understanding certain aspects of MacDonald’s fantasy literature. MacDonald developed a decidedly theological understanding of story as having the capacity to refresh the revelatory nature of Scripture. It is by the imagination that a poet is able to find new forms to recast and recover old and forgotten truths. By designating the poet as a finder rather than a maker, MacDonald resists Coleridge’s idealist inclinations to elevate the poet to a creator. His employment of story and more particularly the “parabolic” is then not only an aesthetic but also a theological choice. MacDonald’s last fantasy romance, Lilith, will serve as our test case to demonstrate this. Considering the “parabolic” in Lilith sheds significant light on the meaning of Lilith and offers up a decisive answer to the important question of whether MacDonald moves in his fantasy and fairytales from a decidedly Christian perspective to a more polyvalent view of reality. This argument shall be further substantiated by bringing to the light the important influence of Novalis on Lilith.

Scottish authors throughout the ages have linked their art to their nationality. When the contemporary writer A. L. Kennedy observes, 'I believe that fiction with a thread of Scottishness in its truth has helped me to know how to be myself as a Scot,' she pinpoints the value of literature for both her predecessors and peers. However, the idea of Scottish literature as an autonomous and coherent national literature is controversial. Questions concerning self-sufficiency, unity, and value continue to haunt the idea of a Scottish literary tradition. Many studies have attempted to address the stereotype of Scottish literature's fragmentation and its place as a sub-category within English literature; however, few critical works have considered specific literary forms as constituting a basis for the Scottish literary consciousness. 'A Thread of Scottishness' argues that Scottish literature uniquely sustains an allegorical framework traceable from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to the present. Chapter one discusses allegory's history, definition and relationship with the reader. Chapters two, three, and four focus upon the specific theoretical strands of the Scottish allegorical form: nature, nationalism, and morality, respectively. Each of these three chapters begins with a discussion of works from the medieval period and follows the progression of the Scots' use of allegory through time. More modern works, including S. Ferrier's Marriage, R. L. Stevenson's The Master of Ballantrae, N. Shepherd's The Weatherhouse, are shown to reflect the narrative traditions of medieval and Renaissance texts, such as R. Henryson's Morall Fabillis and The Testament of Cresseid, King James I's The Kingis Quair, and Sir D. Lindsay's Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis. Thus, through a consideration of the use of allegory within specific Scottish texts, I posit continuity for Scottish literature as a whole.

Christian allegorical literature is a genre that explores apologetic claims in a unique and creative way. Although this genre has attracted many readers over the years, there is hesitation and reluctancy to accept Christian allegorical literature as a genre that should be used as an apologetic method. Namely, the didactic intent of this genre has caused some critics to question whether Christian allegorical literature promotes critical reading and thinking skills in a way that leads readers to make their own spiritual decisions. Some skeptics believe that sharing theistic truths that are disguised by fictional storylines is a creative way to forcibly push Christian theism on readers, instead of allowing them to engage critically with the narratives. This thesis argues that critical engagement skills are necessary to fully understand Christian allegorical literature. Furthermore, the critical reader’s free will must be taken into consideration when analyzing books of this genre. Even if an author presents accurate theological claims, the critical reader has the ability to decide whether he will be moved to action by the apologetic truths he uncovers in the narrative. The research of this thesis concludes that critical reading and thinking skills can readily be applied to Christian allegorical literature. Readers who engage critically with Christian allegorical texts have the tools they need to determine what parts of the text they believe should impact their spiritual lives. Although Christian authors might act as a spiritual catalyst, it is the reader who decides whether he will pursue or reject Christianity. For this reason, Christian allegorical literature continues to be used as a resource that encourages critical thinking about spirituality.

Lawrence's work has almost invevitably been read as an aesthetic production whereby one must eventually agree or disagree with his vision of "reality". Those who assume a formalist standard of taste often find that Lawrence "loses control" of his material; those who offer ideological apologies for his work argue that disruptions in the aesthetic plane are representative of an exploratory genius, often seen as the outstanding characteristic of literary modernism. Both approaches, explicitly or otherwise , rely on the ultimate sanction of the achieved image, transmuted by the author always in control of his material. Yet anyone who reads Lawrence with an eye to to what the "tale" says in addition to what the "teller" claims discovers that Lawrence is not in full control of his material, thought it cannot simply be argued, on aesthetic or linguistic criteria, that he is out of control. Rather, there exists a "third" state whereby Lawrence both writes and is written, gives us a message with one hand, yet retracts, as it were, with the other. Because this double-move is preeminently suited to the language of fiction, and because it appears in Lawrence's fiction with the greatest versatility and incisiveness, this dissertation analyzes six of his novels for their rhetorical significance, understood as both an organization of tropes and figures and as a system of persuasive doctrine. A new definition for allegory is proposed, the introductions of thematic and structural "blanks" is examined, and a spread of narrative delays are identified and discussed, all concerned with the central problem of writing novels that direct themselves to the resurrection of a pre-linguistic universe, yet ironically depend more and more upon writing to bring this about. Ideas drawn from Continental philosophy and recent critical theory are incorporated for support and instruction. Attention is also focused on Lawrence's revision processes, often with specific emphasis on unpublished manuscript material.

The Triumph of Death is a woefully understudied motif of late medieval art, almost completely overlooked in studies on medieval death imagery and culture. Scholarship on the Triumph of Death is scant and has favored an iconographic and stylistic approach to the subject. By framing the Triumph of Death within its cultural and socio-historical context, addressing literary associations with this motif, and studying its visual developments, this dissertation aims to provide a new insight into the medieval perception of the Triumph of Death imagery. In investigating a broad range of late medieval Italian Triumph of Death frescoes, and studying them through the lenses of gender, reception, and performance theories, my dissertation reveals that representations of personified Death as Mors triumphans (“Death in triumph”) are polysemic. Specifically, I explore the Triumph of Death imagery in relation to four major themes: epidemic disease, courtly love, female personifications of Death in monastic sites, and the vernacular culture of lay brotherhoods of flagellants.

My dissertation, Explaining The Poets: Greek Literary Exegesis from The Sixth to the Fourth Centuries BCE, studies how the Classical audience interpreted Archaic poetry.Scholars usually regard literary criticism as a Hellenistic or Aristotelian product. Earlier exegesis, as a result, has received little and often misguided attention. By contrast, my project demonstrates that poetry was not merely utilized as a repository of moral and stylistic norms; rather, it emerged as an autonomous object of study. Explaining The Poets is organized around two broad and historically productive modes of approaching literary texts: problems-and-solutions inquiries, ζητήματα, (chapters 1–3) and the practice of interpreting texts allegorically, “allegoresis” (chapters 4–6). Zetematic texts first appear in the fourth century BCE, yet the origins of this mode of inquiry are much older. Literary challenges framed as problems and solutions were widespread, particularly in the archaic symposium, and their productive influences can be detected in such diverse works as the Contest of Homer and Hesiod (chapter 2) and Against Homer’s Poetry by Zoilus of Amphipolis (chapter 3). The practice of interpreting texts allegorically is as old as the sixth century BCE. After a methodological introduction (chapter 4), in chapter 5 I focus on two forerunners of allegoresis: Theagenes of Rhegium and Pherekydes of Syrus. Finally, the bulk of chapter 6 deals with the oldest allegorical treatise preserved to a significant extent: the Derveni papyrus. In contrast to previous scholarship, I claim that there is strong continuity between the exegetical attempts of literalist and allegorist readers. Ancient allegorists, in fact, viewed their efforts as readings from within the text and employed the same exegetical techniques that will later be sanctioned by literalist critics such as Aristotle. Overall, my work provides new insights on well-studied texts (the Contest and the Derveni Papyrus) and brings attention to neglected but influential grammarians such as Theagenes and Zoilus. By shifting the focus from the Hellenistic and later periods to the Classical Period, my dissertation re-imagines the “invention” of criticism in Greece and contributes to the recent scholarly interest in hermeneutics and exegetical texts.

At issue is the question of whether it is logically consistent to embrace the existence of an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent God in the presence of evil and suffering. Many factors prima facie seem to indicate that the existence of such a God in the presence of an abundance of pain, evil, and suffering is logically incoherent. If such a God does exist, why does He allow the evil and suffering that He does? Hume asserts, such a being should be capable of preventing evil and suffering. Van Inwagen argues that the existence of a world that is constantly modified to override the laws of nature by preventing evil and suffering, Hume’s happy world, would be massively irregular. Furthermore, Van Inwagen counters that an adequate defense can demonstrate that seemingly incoherent facts are not necessarily evidence against a theory. Therefore, is it possible to construct a defense that could satisfy some of Hume’s demands without causing massive irregularities? Can the construction of a possible world reconcile some of the demands of Hume’s hedonic Utopia with Van Inwagen’s objections? Is it possible to develop a middle ground—a middle world—that might behave as a defense against the problem of suffering? A Patristic Christological Defense explores potential options that may be available for how an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent God may overcome evil and suffering, should He decide to do so. A possible world capable of making a Patristic Christological Defense against the problem of suffering caused by broken relationships must include 1. An omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent God who cares about justice. 2. Should He decide to counter suffering, He must also behave within certain self-imposed limitations that were set the moment that creatures with moral competencies came into being. 3. This possible world must also include higher-level freewill, sentient creatures who are subject to natural laws (regularity), like the actual world. And finally, 4. these morally culpable creatures must also have the intellectual capacity to detect suffering but are limited in their scope as to why they suffer. Higher-level freewill, sentient creatures, in any possible world, will possess significantly less knowledge than their creator. Outside of the cognizance of these creatures, it is reasonable to believe that immaterial realms exist through which an omnibenevolent God can act. This project aims to build a creative defense utilizing the conduit of the immaterial realm (soul, mind, and will) of the Patristic view of the Incarnation by exploring the ontological implications of the Incarnation and the existential application of the Incarnation through biblical narratives as the Patristics saw them, which may, in turn, yield some morally sufficient reasons (not necessarily actual reasons) in a possible world for God allowing suffering caused by broken relationships.

“Rewrite this Book” argues that medieval English bookmakers created bound works with aggregate and varied contents akin to earlier compilations and compendia. These objects, which I call “mixed-manuscripts” are often anonymously produced, contain many works by different writers and in different genres, serve as the material grounds for associative reading not directed by a compiler’s notes or evaluations, and are fertile ground for associative thought and creative production. These mixed objects were constructed by hand both by amateurs and professionals to protect, collect, and associate texts with each other, forming textual ‘societies’ between the covers of a book. Within these books, clusters of regularly associated medieval texts began to circulate in small, stable groups of ‘textual companions,’ appear together in several different manuscripts. Some late medieval poetry, Piers Plowman chief among them, took these mixed structures as a compositional model and crafted intricately associative poetical works rooted in companion networks.Chapter one reads the Vernon manuscript as a mixed-manuscript which contains “Ypotis” and the Middle English “Castle of Love” which together present Christian political thought in vernacular poetry, giving its lay audience an idealized fantasy of political harmony. Chapter two reads across Piers Plowman from the Peace in Passus 4 to the Peace in 18 and unites them allegorically to picture of ‘peace’ personifying across gender, social position, and poetic space. Adapting Grosseteste’s Castle into later versions of Piers Plowman produces an unsteady instantiation of the concept which reveals difference in ‘peace’ afforded to the farmer-Peace of passus 4 and that brought about by the noble daughter of the king in passus 18. Chapter three examines the conversation between Meed and Conscience, the episode of the Pardon, and Imaginatif’s bookish suggestions as examples of allegorizations trying to cope with the textual complications of the poem’s expansion via integration of external texts. Chapter four argues that boke of John Colyns, which contains early versions of John Skelton’s poetry alongside the established stanzaic Morte Arthur, radicalizes Morte with Skelton verse and protects the same through its association with the politically dull Morte. Colyns thus imagines that his boke is destined to make Skelton great, but the laureate updates and collects his poems in print, authorizing himself for fame and political security.

“Still Hidden in the Future” takes a pragmatist approach to reading the mutual interference of allegory and metalepsis in British fiction in the long nineteenth century. I begin the study by providing a threefold account of metalepsis derived from narratology, traditional rhetoric, and the work of Harold Bloom. In each instance, the trope serves to disrupt priority, and reading texts marked by metaleptic effects often requires entertaining nonstandard and occasionally counterlogical interpretive premises. With that in mind, the dissertation offers a metacritical argument that prescriptive reading methodologies foreclose potentially illuminating critical maneuvers and, for that reason, should be ignored. Paul Feyerabend’s critique of the scientific method serves as theoretical grounding for this aspect of the argument. The first chapter elaborates a model for reading based on the practice of modeling developed in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass and “What the Tortoise Said to Achilles.” The pragmatist approach I develop in the chapter serves as a model for my work in later chapters, and my reading of metalepsis in Carroll’s fable of right-thinking feeds back into my larger polemic against received method. The second chapter makes a more radical argument about an intra-oeuvre metalepsis in G.K. Chesteron’s corpus. Investigating the meaning of a series of cryptic notes in The Man Who Was Thursday leads me not only to a metaleptic intensification of Thursday’s themes in the much later Tales of the Long Bow but also to a metaleptically embedded justification of my own badly premised search in one note’s allusion to a similar effort in W.S. Gilbert’s Bab Ballads. The final chapter amounts to a symptomatic reading of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, arguing that the author’s use of a banshee figure appropriated from Ann Fanshawe’s memoirs reveals the novel as an attempt to rewrite the suffering of Irish people during the Great Hunger as a text about personal, apolitical mourning. In each of the chapters, I deliberately incorporate elements of earlier, abortive interpretive efforts to emphasize the pragmatist commitments of my approach.

The Ebstorf Cloth was an embroidery of the Mystic Hunt made by a nun in Ebstorf Covent in Germany in 1475. The embroidery was used as an altar cloth, in particular to hold the Missal during Mass. The visual and theological density of the Mystic Hunt allegory—in which the Annunciation is staged as a unicorn hunt—is a fitting analogy for the experience of enclosed life. Contemporary monastic reform and construction at Ebstorf reinforced enclosure, bringing new nuances to the nun’s understanding of the Virgin in the gated garden motif. The pair of Virgin Mary and Gabriel also emphasize the mutability priest and nun during the aural exchange of the Mass, in which nun’s works of art and music served an integral role in the Eucharistic Liturgy.

This dissertation considers references to soil in the work of Renaissance English poet Edmund Spenser, arguing that Spenser uses soil in his work to reflect upon issues of interpretation, representation, and allegory. Examining The Shepheardes Calender, A View of the State of Ireland, and Book I of The Faerie Queene, I argue that soil in Spenser's work is neither simply a metaphor nor simply a reference to the real world environment of Renaissance England. Rather, it embodies a complex and shifting signification that reflects the broad range of influences on Spenser's life: humanist training, the English efforts to colonize Ireland, and the overlapping discourses of Protestantism and English nationalism. Because these varying and at times contradictory discourses all used references to and metaphors of soil, soil, I argue, became for Spenser a useful way of exploring how meaning is assigned, navigated, and understood, especially in instances where there are conflicting influences upon the creation of meaning. I argue that soil's ability to call attention to the processes of meaning-making and interpretation have important implications for a range of Spenserian topics, not least of them being the nature of allegory. But I also argue that Spenser’s use of soil has implications more broadly for how the nonhuman world of the Renaissance is understood. Ultimately, I argue that Spenser—and, by extension, the Renaissance more broadly—requires a different way of thinking about the environment than is commonplace in ecocriticism and contemporary culture today, a way that is alert to the Renaissance’s mutually constitution of the “literary” and the “real.”

Scholars of early modern literature often consider allegory inherently idealist, particularly in its exploitation of visual description, which, they argue, produces a spurious vividness that tries to pass off the schematic and the ideal as natural. Critics who subscribe to this view often celebrate Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene (1590/96) as both a pinnacle of the genre and a skeptical anatomy of it—a great allegory that is great because it exposes allegory's illusions. As the argument goes, Spenser reveals the false visuality at the heart of allegory by complicating his imagery with naturalistic description. By turning allegorical images against themselves, the poem prevents allegory from subordinating the world of matter and appearances to a timeless conceptual order.This dissertation, Allegory and the Art of Memory, offers an alternative framework for understanding allegory's visuality and Spenser's use of it: the mental visualization techniques of the classical and medieval memory arts. Because these mnemonic methods draw mental imagery into the service of memorizing words and ideas, they too have been accused of visual bad faith, but recent scholarship has excavated the practical and philosophical contexts in which these methods were used, and this visual regime gives us a new way to think about allegorical imagery as well. I argue that in adapting the memory arts to narrative poetry, medieval allegorists did not aspire to impress an idealist image of cosmic harmony upon the empirical world but to lead readers through a voluntary and collaborative process of composing meditative imagery. In the following pages, I analyze three pre-Spenserian allegorical poems particularly engaged with the theory and practice of memory: Guillaume de Deguileville's Le Pèlerinage de la Vie Humaine (1330-32), Olivier de la Marche's Le Chevalier Délibéré (1483), and Stephan Batman's loose adaptation of Le Chevalier Délibéré into The Trauayled Pylgrime (1569). I use these analyses to illuminate crucial episodes of The Faerie Queene to show that, rather than revealing the fissures in the earlier poems' methods, The Faerie Queene continues their project by adapting allegory to the transformed media environment of sixteenth-century England, where the visual mnemonics of the memory arts had mostly been discarded. The pre-Spenserian poems I analyze borrow formal elements from mnemonic techniques while critically evaluating the practices and the role of memory in human life. The Faerie Queene, I argue, follows their trajectory into the age of print. Whereas the older poems treat their imagery as a script for composing mental images, Spenser uses the formal tropes of the memory arts—image (imago), place (locus), and order (ordo)—to represent memory-processes, not just of the individual but of an entire culture, a collective record that is both analogous to memory and radically unaccommodating to the human mind.

El presente trabajo pretende profundizar en las coordenadas temporales del auto y sus implicaciones en la plasmación de la alegoría, tanto desde un punto de vista dramático como teológico, para apreciar el alcance específicamente escatológico de este auto primerizo.

Estudio de los espacios míticos en los autos de argumento mitológico de Calderón, tales como islas, laberintos, jardines, o palacios maravillosos, analizando las dimensiones alegóricas orientadas por textos bíblicos y patrísticos en un ejercicio de síntesis cultural característico de las obras sacramentales de Calderón.

The favourite reappeared in Spanish politics at the end of the 16th century with the duke of Lerma and Philip III. From that moment, works were published presenting that minister as main character. Interestingly, these these characters cannot only be found in comedies or dramas but in sacramental plays as well. El lirio y el azucena by Pedro Calderón, performed in 1660, portrays don Luis de Haro, primeminister of Philip IV, who played an important role in the peace talks between Spain and France, and in the marriage of María Teresa de Austria and Luis XIV. The analysis of the sacramental play proves that, according to Calderón, don Luis de Haro was the last favourite or prime minister of Philip IV.

My dissertation joins a vibrant conversation with James G. Henderson and colleagues, curriculum workers involved with leadership envisioned and embodied in his Collegial Curriculum Leadership Process (CCLP). Their work, “embedded in dynamic, open-ended folding, is a recursive, multiphased process supporting educators with a particular vocational calling” (Henderson, 2017). The four key Deleuzian “folds” of the process explore “awakening” to become lead professionals for democratic ways of living, cultivating repertoires for a diversified, holistic pedagogy, engaging in critical self-examinations and critically appraising their professional artistry. In “reactivating” the lived experiences, scholarship, writing and vocational calling of a brilliant Greek and Latin scholar named Marya Barlowski, meanings will be constructed as engendered through biographical narrative and currere case study. Grounded in the curriculum leadership “map,” she represents an allegorical presence in the narrative. Allegory has always been connected to awakening, and awakening is a precursor for capacity-building. The research design (the precise way in which to study this `problem’) will be a combination of historical narrative and currere. This collecting and constructing of Her story speaks to how the vision of leadership isn’t completely new – threads of it are tied to the past. Her intrinsic motivational indicators as relevant to curriculum leadership will be described and analyzed through her lived experiences, scholarship and writing that all pointed towards her vocational calling.

The purpose of this thesis is to demonstrate that while Arthur Miller’s 1952 play The Crucible is often cited as a political allegory of the McCarthy era, analyzing various instances of irony and how language itself becomes almost criminal shows the play can also be interpreted as satire. This thesis begins with a detailed analysis of Puritan life and religion to show how Spectral Evidence and an inherent fear of the Devil become the driving forces of the Salem Trials. From there, an examination of the political climate that inspires Miller to do a close-reading of human behavior shows how officials in both eras are able to easily manipulate language to perpetuate fear. A study of conflicting power dynamics encourages a separation between church and state, and further establishes a correlation between 1692 Salem and 1950s America. Ultimately, this thesis utilizes a Historicist approach to argue that The Crucible can be understood as a satirical allegory because although the judges in both eras claim they want to expose the truth, they instead manipulate facts and place blame in order to hide their personal agendas for political power. This thesis concludes in agreement with Miller that “The Crucible was an attempt to make life real again, palpable and structured. One hoped that a work of art might illuminate the tragic absurdities of an anterior work of art that was called reality, but was not. It was the very swiftness of change that lent it this surreality” (“Are You Now” n.p.).

Este artículo trata sobre un auto sacramental de Lope poco estudiado y leído: La puente del mundo. El análisis de su escritura y su estructura es un buen ejemplo de la técnica sacramental de principios del siglo XVII, más cercana a la retórica de la sacralización y con escasa relación a la construcción de un artefacto alegórico de complejas referencias, que domina el género sacramental a partir de la segunda mitad de la centuria con el dominio incuestionable de Calderón de la Barca.

Modes of the Flesh considers the ways that literary form—mode, in particular—shapes the representation of the human body in British literature from approximately 1660-1800. Focusing on the allegorical, satirical, pornographic, and gothic modes, this project aims to expand our conception of literary embodiment, establish the represented body as a formal element, and make embodiment central to our understanding of the textual representation of human beings. Because modally-inflected literary bodies engage the same kinds of ontological and epistemological questions entertained by this period’s empiricist philosophy, I argue that mode offers its own kind of philosophy of the body. But, because modal bodies engage these questions with a very different set of tools, the results are often provocatively at odds with mainstream philosophical discourse.Existing scholarship on the literary body tends either to analyze the way a body is represented in order to better understand the work’s themes or meanings, or to argue that the way a body is represented reflects historical or theoretical models of embodiment. This dissertation differs from the first tendency by offering a theory of the represented body, and therefore taking the body as an object, not an instrument, of study. It diverges from the second tendency by arguing that the way bodies are presented in literature has as much to do with the kind of text they appear in as with scientific, theological, social, or other extra-literary understandings of the body. In each chapter, I focus on a significant mode of Restoration and eighteenth-century literature, and a particular aspect of literary embodiment. The first chapter, on the allegorical mode and bodily matter, thinks about the function of materiality in a mode commonly associated with abstraction and interpretation. The second chapter, which considers the satirical mode and bodily form, explores the role of abstract form in satirical conceptions of personhood and in the ordering of the satirical universe. The third chapter focuses on the pornographic mode and the body as sensation in order to re-think the mechanics and ethics of pornography. And, in the fourth chapter, I consider the gothic mode in terms of the two kinds of embodiment it pits against one another (the body as figure, and the body as subjectivity) in order to consider its fantastical exaggerations of empirical—and especially skeptical—epistemology. In the coda, I meditate on the desire for disembodiment and the fundamental importance of the body to the representation of human experience.In the course of developing a formal theory of the body in Restoration and eighteenth-century literature, Modes of the Flesh challenges the tendency in literary studies to marginalize the body in favor of the mind. By foregrounding the body and mode, it expands the scope of character studies and challenges the centrality of the rise of the novel to the field of eighteenth-century studies.

Scholars often frame allegory as if it were tied to stable signifiers (i.e. white as purity) and therefore insulated from material concerns. I argue, however, that allegorical clothing is always-already material. That is, it is necessarily tied to material concerns either with respect to fashion or status, and therefore all allegorical costume should be seen as a comment on contemporary material culture. In order to make this argument, this dissertation tracks allegorical costume in English poetry from Langland to Spenser. Starting in the 14th century, there was a rapid expansion of access to and variety in fashion, and there was an increased awareness that identity could be donned and therefore bought and sold. This troubled contemporary moralists, who struggled to define how clothing worked in the public sphere, and it troubled allegorical poets, who struggled to apply stable literary markers in a shifting discursive field. Because allegory is only able to signify through a shared contemporary discourse, I thus argue that fashion both disrupted the discursive field around dress and destabilized allegorical imagery. Chapter 1 examines William Langland’s Piers Plowman and The Book of Margery Kempe to see how allegorical conventions conflict with the way characters read each other’s clothing, and how the access to power and institutional backing allows certain characters to define how their clothing is read. Chapter 2 explores the rise of the morality play by perusing The Castle of Perseverance, Mankind, and Hyckescorner. While, morality plays are often assumed to be heavy handed lectures that impose categorical imperatives on their audience members, this chapter shows that English morality plays are inescapably material. Even though their structure remains consistent, their descriptions and staging of righteousness shifts along with East Anglian politics. Chapter 3 compares Skelton’s Bowge of Court to his one surviving morality play, Magnyfycence. While both are courtly, dramatic allegories, they establish different rules under which clothing can signify and include different individuals into those systems. Chapter 4 analyzes Britomart in Spenser’s Faerie Queene in order to show how the transformative potential of Britomart’s armor shifts with Spenser’s waning enthusiasm for Elizabeth I. This dissertation contends that material valences of allegorical imagery contend with and sometimes overwhelm classical models or literary convention, and that struggle within the mode demonstrates profound continuity between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

This project argues for the persistence of biblical allegory in eighteenth-century Christian thought, contrary to the narrative of allegory’s demise, found, for instance, in the work of Peter Harrison and Hans Frei. I demonstrate that two factors in particular, the scientific revolution and Christian discourse about Jewish interpretation, shaped the content and quality of allegorical interpretations of the Bible in this century. Using the case of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), natural philosopher and biblical commentator, the dissertation will consider how allegory functioned amidst epistemological shifts brought on by new naturalistic and mechanistic explanations of the universe, and amidst tides of anti-Judaism and Christian Kabbalah. This project is divided into three parts, which examine the context, content, and reception of Swedenborg’s multi-volume biblical commentary, Arcana coelestia. Part one lays contextual groundwork with a brief comparative look to the commentaries of other eighteenth-century figures, both Jewish and Christian. I survey the discourse about allegory, science, and religious identity in the commentaries of William Whiston, Johan Kemper, Moses Mendelssohn, and Menaḥem Naḥum. Part two contains a close reading of Swedenborg’s interpretation of Genesis 3, revealing a bias against the two communities of interpreters he believes incapable of accessing the full depths of biblical wisdom: scientists, or the learned skeptics of natural philosophy, and the Jews. Using Harold Bloom’s concept of the “anxiety of influence” I point to resemblances in Swedenborg’s own hermeneutic to interpretive methods deemed, by either himself or those around him, to be Jewish, kabbalistic, or naturalistic. Part three examines Swedenborg’s reception, revealing a double ambivalence to Swedenborg and to allegory among figures as diverse as Immanuel Kant, John Wesley, Friedrich Oetinger, William Blake and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. These men had in common a fascination with Swedenborg’s doctrine of correspondences, but also harbored deep reservations that manifested in moments of harsh criticism and even ridicule. Despite such protestations, those interested in Swedenborg often produce reformulations of biblical allegory in their own terms. This is, therefore, a study of the relationship between texts and contexts, and the persistence of allegory even in an age that was supposedly hostile to it.

During the period of military government in Argentina, Brazil (1964 –1982) and the present day communist Cuban regime, a machinery of cultural repression was established in these countries, these states had a systematic plan of cultural repression of any kind of opposition, dictatorships had an organized and sophisticated operating control over the press and all publications. The dissident writers examined in this dissertation developed strategies of resistance that depended largely on allegory to carry their messages against their respective oppressive regimes. By means of a detailed rhetorical analysis, our study examines the lookings of allegory and cultural resistance under the constraints of repression. Our corpus includes six novels written by dissident writers during the period studied in this dissertation. The fictional narratives selected in this study are divided into novels from Brazil, Argentina and Cuba. The Brazilian novels: of Jorge Amado Dona Flor e seus dois maridos (1966) and Érico Verissimo, Incidente en Antares (1971); two Argentine novels: Ricardo Piglia’s, Respiración artificial (1980) and Martin Khoan’s, Dos veces junio (2002); and by two Cubans: Jesús Díaz, Las iniciales de la tierra (1987) and Zoé Valdés, La nada cotidiana (1995). This dissertation demostrates that allegory and ghosts, as literary figures, can evolve and assume new functions of resisting oppressive governments through confronting, denouncing, identifying and conjuring national traumas as well as adapting themselves to the different political circumstances in which they are used.

Charles d’Orléans (1394-1465) had a long and extensive history with poetry, both collecting and writing, that began in childhood and carried through his imprisonment to the end of his life. Charles’s familiarity with poetry and the allegorical mode specifically provides Charles with forms to manipulate as the questions the veracity of the genre’s strengths in revealing hidden truths. For a writer whose own youth was cut short by the early assumption of adult aristocratic responsibilities, Charles d’Orléans’s poems dwell upon the figures of the four ages and the workings of time. Dislocated from his native France and held in England as a prisoner, Charles is owned by neither critical tradition despite writing in both languages. Charles’s poetry, and even his life, can be characterized by the word ‘between’: he spoke between languages, lived between nations, and wrote between ages. Fortunes Stabilnes manipulates the allegorical genre by introducing this state of ‘between’ and allowing introspection where previously there had been none. This report argues that the poet-persona in Fortunes Stabilnes moves between the established allegorical ages to gain inspiration for his poetic endeavors.

Abstract: In 1915, Ireland was on the brink of the revolutionary Easter Rising. By 1949, the nation was officially declared a republic, no longer part of the British Commonwealth. These years flank the creation of five paintings by the Irish artist Seán Keating in which the painter has included his own portrait within the various scenes. These paintings, as allegorical self-portraits, allow for a diachronic construction of an artistic identity based on the visual figure’s position vis-a-vis the dominant ideology of the period. Keating’s self-portraits transition from violent nationalist in Men of the West through a period of revolutionary disavowal and a flirtation with socialism in An Allegory and Night’s Candles are Burnt Out respectively. Finally, Ulysses in Connemara and Economic Pressure, or a Bold Peasant Being Destroyed exhibit the artist in the role of an emigrant forced to leave Ireland due to lack of economic and social opportunities. Utilizing Louis Althusser’s theory of art and ideology from A Letter on Art in Reply to André Daspre, this thesis argues that Keating’s inclusion of his likeness within these five paintings may be understood as a visual commentary on the shifting and tumultuous ideological state of affairs in Ireland during the first half of the twentieth century.

The sky, earth, and horizon are always with us from our earliest memories: indeed it is impossible to imagine a time or an experience without them. But it is this very proximity that has come to betray us. Further, with the rise of urban dwelling and the concomitant estrangement with the natural condition, people today are not able to appreciate these elemental forces the way they once could. This has contributed to an impoverished understanding of the natural environment.

This dissertation presents a systematic reading of the four discourses Kierkegaard wrote on Matthew 6:24-34, which I am calling the Lily Discourses (“What We Learn from the Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air” (1847); “The Cares of the Pagans” (1848); “The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air” (1849); “Christ as Archi-Image” (1851)). Matthew instructs the reader to “consider the lilies,” and in reading this passage Kierkegaard presents the lilies as authoritative, rather than merely “figural” or “metaphoric”. The aim of this dissertation is to describe what Kierkegaard means by the authority of the lily and the bird. Since Kierkegaard engages with and in “figural” language in his pseudonymous as well as his signed texts, what he says about the lily and the bird in these four Discourses is significant for all of Kierkegaard’s work. In the first and the third Discourses Kierkegaard writes lyrically of the beauty of nature, but concludes with a brutal picture of nature’s death and decay. It is not nature, this dissertation argues, but the trace nature leaves in language, that Kierkegaard is investigating. Kierkegaard ends the first Discourse by invoking the positing power of language: he says, “Let the lily wither”. As if in response to the death at the end of the first Discourse, the second is written in praise “on the day all goes black.” If the first two Discourses describe the authority of the lily and the bird in terms of the performative – of positing and praise – the third Discourse describes this authority in terms of receptivity. The lily and the bird are obedient, Kierkegaard says there. He develops an account of obedience that is, on the one hand, required for reading the lily and the bird (for granting authority), and on the other, is the lesson taught by the lily and the bird. In the fourth Discourse Kierkegaard presents the archi-image (Forbillede, previously translated in English as “pattern” or “prototype”) and what corresponds to it: “imitation.” Only when we imitate, rather than ape mimetically or endlessly interpret, can the image (Billede) that we are responding to be the archi-image (Forbillede). The lily and the bird, the dissertation argues, have the authority of the archi-image only if we can read them in a certain way, that is, if our reading is non-mimetic imitation. For Kierkegaard imitation is an act, made by an individual person at a concrete time and place in history; it therefore commits the reader, in her full responsibility (including “social” or “political”) in the risk of reading. The dissertation has four chapters, each devoted to one of Kierkegaard’s Lily Discourses. Accordingly, Chapter One describes Kierkegaard’s account of the authority of the lily and the bird as positing, Chapter Two as praise, Chapter Three as obedience and Chapter Four as imitation.

Allegory refers to a narrative that can be interpreted to reveal an additional layer of symbolic meaning beyond what appears on the surface. More specifically, an embodied allegory is created when the target domain is never explicitly mentioned and the source domain draws upon embodied concepts. For example, the poem, “Diving Into the Wreck,” by Adrienne Rich, describes a scuba diver going down to explore a wrecked ship. Although the poem describes the diverse, specific actions, it also invites an allegorical interpretation in which the investigation of a wrecked ship symbolically represents one person’s look back at a past failed romantic relationship. The present studies investigate whether ordinary readers are capable of inferring allegorical messages when reading Rich’s poem and how they might do so. Two studies prompted participants to think of the poem in a literal way (as though the poem is about scuba diving), in a particular metaphoric way (as though the poem is about a failed relationship), in a general metaphoric way (as though the poem has multiple valid meanings), or with no prompt (in a control condition participants saw no prompt). In general, the data suggests that participants could interpret the allegorical messages in the Rich poem, not through abstract, disembodied processes, but rather through embodied simulations. These results are considered in relationship to current theories in cognitive science on conceptual metaphor and allegory. I argue that allegorical interpretation is not limited to formal analyses done by literary scholars. Instead, the embodied simulations that are a fundamental trait of human cognition drive allegorical interpretation. The same resources used to reason about action and perception are used to comprehend both everyday language as well as poetic instances of allegory.

El trabajo trata de abordar la producción de los autos sacramentales de Lope de Vega. Un primer y fundamental problema se deriva de la de- finición misma del género. Por esto, se toman como referencia dos de las características más repetidas en la mayoría de definiciones: el carácter alegórico y la estructura sacramental-eucarística. Con un corpus de cuarenta y dos autos fiables del Fénix, se estudia la presencia de cada uno de estos dos rasgos y se trata, por un lado, de establecer su validez como definición genérica y, por otro lado, de dilucidar las afinidades estéticas del autor en el uso de la alegoría, la exaltación final eucarística, el uso de materia bíblica, de materia de tradición literaria, el estudio de posibles evoluciones internas... Se demuestra que Lope prefiere los autos de estructura alegórica a los bíblicos. Además, ninguna de estas obras con la exaltación eucarística final es de procedencia bíblica (salvo las parábolas), por lo que, para insertar el sacramento, Lope parece sentirse más cómodo con los límites más difusos que la alegoría ofrece. Así, aunque tomara prestado en ocasiones material argumental de la tradición literaria o religiosa, Lope prefiere inventar o participar de los lugares comunes de sus escritores contemporáneos a la hora de acercarse al auto sacramental. Ya por último, resulta interesante el uso de la historia en los autos, algo no muy bien visto por la tradición crítica y que, sin embargo, Lope no parece desdeñar en absoluto.

Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene exhibits a complex array of detail that cannot be overlooked, from the description of Red Crosse Knight and Error to the successful completion of his quest for holiness. My thesis will carefully examine Book 1, with the most attention given to Cantos 1, 2, and 11. Within these sections, a solid foundation is established, and the other cantos rest heavily on this groundwork. More significantly, answers to the following queries will be revealed both through my lens of interpretation as well as relying on other scholar's previous work: What does the encounter between Red Crosse Knight and Error represent, and how does it denounce the Catholic Church? What were the reasons for Spenser's decision to use medieval diction and a variety of character names from several languages within his work? Who, aside from Sidney, were the other writers that inspired Spenser's epic, and in turn, what knowledge did Spenser gain from each of their works? How does the encounter between Red Crosse Knight and the dragon compare to the temptation of Jesus in the desert, and why is this event integral to the epic? Finally, how does the epic both "delight and teach" readers, to quote Sidney, and what are the means/conventions used to accomplish this task?

This report examines Porphyry’s De antro nympharum and its eclectic mixture of philosophy, allegory, and mysticism in the form of a Homeric commentary. The paper situates Porphyry’s commentary in the broader tradition of Homeric interpretation with special attention to Stoic exegesis and Platonic views on poetry and myth. It also contextualizes Porphyry’s philosophy in terms of the mystery cults, particularly Mithraism, that had grown very popular by Porphyry’s time. The paper argues that Porphyry devised a practice of reading intended to promote a level of philosophical contemplation beyond the level of rational discourse, in keeping with the Neoplatonic philosophy of his teacher, Plotinus, and that this practice is especially evident in the De antro nympharum.

The late paintings of Victorian artist Frederic Leighton generally embody an abstract idea or concept instead of a specific story or moral. Many of these images express humanity's experience of the passage of time as it relates to life, death, and rebirth. Leighton's paintings The Garden of the Hesperides, Lachrymae, and Flaming June represent allegories of timelessness, death, and regeneration, respectively.

The literary artistry of Bunyan's The Holy War is overshadowed by the longstanding popularity of his greatest-known work The Pilgrim's Progress. However, The Holy War displays an impressive intricately-woven story with several complex strands of allegorical meaning. One such strand is its emphasis on the theme of virtue and vice in literature of the Middle Ages. In The Holy War, Bunyan applies this thematic thread from the Medieval Psychomachia and morality plays to his allegory in seventeenth-century Restoration England. The present research begins with an exploration of allegory as story with emphasis on Bunyan's role as storyteller in general and allegorist in particular. Bunyan not only well understood his contemporary literary context but also recognized that allegory was an apt means of engaging his audience. The research then explores Bunyan's role as a devotional writer with a focus on the spiritual challenges within the individual soul. Bunyan's primary duties were pastoral, and his ultimate goal as a writer was the spiritual transformation of an individual reader's life. The research concludes with a discussion of Bunyan as a social critic of Post-Restoration politics and cultural life. The English Succession Crisis of 1681 presented an opportunity for Bunyan to comment on the political tension that existed between the government of Charles II and Religious Dissenters. This tension is exemplified in the juxtaposition of The Holy War with another literary work of the Succession period, John Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel. All in all, Bunyan emerges as a writer aware of how story, devotion, and social criticism can form a powerful voice in allegory.

In his Additiones ad Postillam Nicolai de Lira, Pablo of Santa María criticizes Lyra, assuming that to his mind «literal sense» and «sense universally accepted or understandable for all» is one and the same. This paper examines the different theories on literal sense proposed by Lyra and Thomas Aquinas, on whose steps Santa María follows, in order to explain why Santa María considers the idea as Lyra’s own. In addition, it is shown how, in his exegetical work, Lyra contradicts the principles on literal sense that he himself had proposed when he was dealing with said topic at a theoretical level in his prologues to the Postilla.