Allegorical Narrative Research Articles

The Environmental Function of Animal Characters Across Different Literary Genres

This article explores the remarkable versatility of animal images and characters through their function in literature. The representation of animals in literature has emerged as one of the powerful tools for promoting environmental awareness and advocacy. Across diverse literary genres, the use of animal imagery and characters serves a multitude of functions in catalyzing ecological consciousness. In lyrical nature writing, vivid descriptions of animals and their habitats evoke emotional resonance, inviting readers to appreciate the fragility and resilience of ecosystems. Allegorical narratives, meanwhile, employ animal protagonists to challenge societal norms and expose environmental injustices through metaphorical storytelling. Even in children's literature, charming portrayals of animal characters serve as accessible gateways for young readers to the natural world.

Reinventing Sacred Ground Amidst Natural Disaster: The Holy Islamic Tomb in Seventeenth-Century Quanzhou

The Holy Islamic Tomb at Lingshan Mountain in Quanzhou, China, is believed to be the final resting place of two of the Prophet Muhammad’s disciples who were dispatched as missionaries in the early seventh century. While prior scholarship has centred on verifying the tradition’s chronology, this article foregrounds the role of environmental actors in the tomb site’s ascent to prominence. I argue that the holy tomb (shengmu) tradition did not emerge until the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, so its invention should be analysed alongside concurrent climate hazards that plagued late Ming China (1368–1644). Uncommon episodes of snowfall, flooding, drought, and associated famines drove Quanzhou’s local communities towards popular religious practices. Muslim visitation practices in Quanzhou, which experienced a restrained period following the decline of Mongol rule, re-emerged into universal consciousness and became integral to the city’s spiritual landscape by aligning with Chinese allegorical narratives. Through this reinvented tradition, the Holy Islamic Tomb was characterized as a site blessed by the heavens during times of cosmic disturbances. Instead of passive assimilation, through which religious identities may be diluted, the active participation of Quanzhou Muslims in local practices empowered them to elevate and honour Islamic traditions within a predominantly non-Muslim society.

Abdel Rahman Munif’s Cities of Salt as a Postmodern Allegorical Narrative

Abdel Rahman Munif’s Cities of Salt as a Postmodern Allegorical Narrative

THE PROBLEM OF FUNCTIONAL GENRE IN AZERBAIJANI FOLKLORE STUDIES

In this article the problem of functional genre, which is an important issue in folklore studies, is studied scientifically and theoretically. The formation of a new genre as a result of the process of deriving a genre from a genre has been brought to attention on the basis of specific texts. These genres are called functional genres and it has been considered on the basis of which specifics functionalize the genres such as “bayati”, “gerayli”, “goshma”, “temsil” and fairy tales. Thus, it was initially noted that the genre of “bayati” (quatrain) is not a specific genre, like many other genres, but, in fact, a literary formula. Because many genres are formed on the basis of the genre “bayati”. Among them are quatrains, lullabies, folk songs, ceremonial songs, elegy and other folklore genres are studied in the article and brought to the attention, due to this functionality, even before it was also considered that it was called a literary kind by A. Abid. In particular, it has been observed that the genres created on the basis of “bayati” are widely included in the ceremonial folklore and from the genres of “bayati” forms created in this direction such as wishes, lullabies, Novruz songs, beliefs, occasions, religious holidays, laments, etc. have been looked through. As a functional genre “garayli” like the genre “bayati” has been put forward as a new problem in theoretical and methodological research and garayli, folk songs and important parts of epics, which appeared on the basis of the genre garayli can serve as an example of it as the main genre component. In the article the genre “goshma” is also studied as a functional genre. So, on the basis of this genre “goshma”, “tajnis”, the verse part of epics, “ustadname”, “vujudname”, “gifilbend”, “baghlama” and other genres were formed. Fables have also been brought to the attention as a functional genre, such as representation derived from this genre, allegorical narrative, examples that arise in written and oral literature, etc. can be examples for it. At the same time the representation is manifested both in fairy tales and the fairy tale itself has spawned many genres from itself. The genres of fairy tales, garavelli, anecdotes, jokes and other genres have been reviewed. The theoretical problem proposed in the study is rich in important innovations for the scientific community.

Mythologems of english vampire fiction in Stephen Edwin King’s ‘Salem’s Lot

The article offers an interpretation of Stephen Edwin King’s novel ‘Salem’s Lot (1975) in the context of how its author productively works with the elements of the ‟vampire myth” created and developed by British gothic writers of the 19th century (John William Polidori, Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker, etc.). The principal of these mythologems (“the depravity of the century, condensed in the figure of a vampire”; “the foreign origin of a vampire, which emphasises its otherness”; “the aristocracy of a vampire”) are successfully adapted by King in accordance with his artistic objectives, which allows the writer to include his text in a rich literary tradition, while preserving the opportunity to express his own creativity. An important artistic finding of King is the synthesis of two genre subforms of the horror novel proposed by him – a vampire novel and a small-town-horror novel: King fruitfully works with the special aesthetics of the first subform and the ideological content of the second, thus making his novel a socially engaged one and turning the plot about the appearance of vampires in New England provincial town into an allegorical narrative about the loss of moral guidelines and general spiritual degradation in America in the 1970s.

Parasite: The Unrepaired Fissures between Allegorical Narration and Realism

Boon Joon-ho's film Parasite inherits the allegorical narrative from his early works The Host and Snowpiercer. In The Host and Snowpiercer, the abstract, hypothetic dystopian setting goes well with the form of political allegory. However, Parasite takes realism as its blueprint and combines realism with an allegorical narrative. The combination casts a higher demand on the director who needs to fix the fissures between realism and the allegorical narrative. However, it's a pity that in Parasite, the lack of subconscious power, the straightforward representation of the silent "other", and the lack of ambiguity together make the combination incomplete and yet unbalanced.

Utopian Vision and Its Double: An Allegorical Portrait of Black Life in Hurston’s One-act Play Mr. Frog

Zora Neale Hurston was an anthropologist and a woman writer participating in the African American literary movement known as the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s. A prolific and versatile writer, she wrote a number of plays, and, in particular, devoted herself to creating ‘black folk comedy’ as a form of ‘the new and the real Negro theatre’ that honestly showed the language and daily life of black people in South Florida. This study focuses on Herston’s one-act play Mr. Frog as an example of black folk comedy. A fable story, the short dramatic skit represents the utopian model of coexistence and symbiotic community by portraying the lives of animals. On the other hand, this utopia created on stage is a space that does not exist in reality, so in return, it indirectly suggests ‘other’ picture hidden behind the surface, namely, the portrait of contemporary black people in South Florida living the harsh reality of racism. In the play, the utopian vision is presented as ‘double’ and this writing strategy meets the nature and effects of an allegorical narrative deriving from the correlation of surface text and the hidden meaning or subtext. This study concludes that Mr. Frog, through the fable story of animals, dramatizes the ‘double’ of the utopian vision that diverges into the ideal community for coexistence and the reality of black life, thereby suggesting a model for allegorical playwriting.

Allegory and the Poetic Self: First-Person Narration in Late Medieval Literature, ed R. Barton Palmer, Katharina Philipowski, and Julia Rüthermann. Gainesville, Tallahasse, et al.: University Press of Florida, 2022, vii, 316 pp.

Narratologically speaking, the emergence of the poetic “I” in late medieval and early modern European literature constitutes a major benchmark of a long-term paradigm shift which ultimately transcended into the Baroque novel written entirely from the first-person perspective, such as the anonymous Spanish Lazarillo de Tormes (1552) and Grimmelshausen German Simplicissimus (1668). However, already high medieval romances such as Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival (ca. 1205) or allegorical narratives such as Hartmann von Aue’s Klagebüchlein (ca. 1180) contain remarkable elements of the playful engagement with the own self. Those are, unfortunately, not even mentioned by any of the contributors to the volume under review here. We also should not forget the strong development of autobiographical poetry in the fifteenth century (cf. A. Classen, Autobiographische Lyrik des europäischen Spätmittelalters, 1991), such as by Oswald von Wolkenstein, Christine de Pizan, Thomas Hoccleve, and Michel Beheim (none of them is considered here). However, the present project excellently edited by two German and one American scholar, aims at the analysis of the conjunction of allegory with the first-person pronoun mostly in late medieval French, some Italian, German, and Spanish allegorizing verse narratives, often in the form of the dream allegory. As the editors emphasize, the exploration of the poetic “I” takes place within a literary discourse, it represents an experimental process, and it reflects the very nature of fictionality (meta-fictionality), which can easily lead to the splitting of the poetic self. Whether this justifies them to call this development transgressive, “oscillating between story and discourse” (15), might be questionable, however.

There's No Place Like Home(land) in American and Soviet Fantasy Cinema of 1939: The Wizard of Oz and Vasilisa the Beautiful

There's No Place Like Home(land) in American and Soviet Fantasy Cinema of 1939: <i>The Wizard of Oz</i> and <i>Vasilisa the Beautiful</i>

Identity in the 21st Century Nigerian Fiction: A Case Study of Blackass by Igoni A. Barrett

This paper attempts to examine the allegorical narrative strategies and politics of identity—race, and gender, using postcolonial and racial frameworks. The novel, Blackass written by a Nigerian writer is a 21st century fierce comic satirical adaptation of Metamorphosis, a novella by Franz Kafka. The intricacies and culture within a society and ethnicity in a nation such as patriarchy are explored through the language, characters, and development of the plot in Nigerian literature. For this essay, I enter into the discourse of race by analyzing the social and cultural phenomena that occur throughout the structure of the fictional work.

Carbon capital: The lexicon and allegories of US hydrocarbon finance

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with energy financiers in Houston, Texas, this paper explores how experts use a lexicon of models and metrics to conceptualize and construct allegories about future hydrocarbon projects and companies. I show that allegorical narratives built with this lexicon advance a kind of energy ethics – distinguishing what is good and advocating for particular hydrocarbon futures. As the energy industry pivots toward renewables, I conclude that these metrics, models and allegories are coming to bear on new forms of extraction. This paper contributes to a better understanding of the financial and managerial processes on which extractive energy practices are imagined, valued and decided.

The king and the beast: Political and poetic shifts in Boccaccio'sAlcestus

Alcestus is the sixth among fifteen eclogues in Giovanni Boccaccio's Buccolicum carmen (c. 1362–63). Like most poems in this book, Alcestus presents an allegorical narrative based upon a specific historical episode. More particularly, Alcestus takes the form of a political panegyric in honour of Louis of Taranto (the husband of Queen Johanna), who returned to Naples in 1348, after a long conflict involving a vendetta for the murder of Andrew of Hungary (Johanna's first husband), in 1345. This article aims to offer, first, an overview of Boccaccio's Alcestus; and then, provide a closer examination of this work. Taking into consideration its historical background, as well as its literary strategies, I will focus on the different kinds of shifts that emerge in the text – from winter to spring, absence to return, sorrow to happiness, and peace to fear. As I will try to demonstrate, these shifts, besides reflecting the political instability that marked the Neapolitan Trecento, also reveal Boccaccio's literary models for this eclogue – mainly Virgil's Eclogues 5 and 8.

Why Medieval Allegory?

Why Medieval Allegory?

René d’Anjou, Le Cuer d’amour espris. Présenté, édité et traduit par Gilles Roussineau

This handsome volume presents a critical edition of the fascinating late medieval allegorical narrative, written in 1457 and revised some twenty years later, by René d’Anjou, Duke of Anjou, Count of Provence, and for a time, King of Naples. Gilles Roussineau also provides an elegant modern French translation, a very useful introductory commentary on the text, and reproductions of the famous miniatures in the Vienna manuscript (Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Codex Vindobonensis 2597), along with detailed description of their content and comments on iconography and style. Once attributed to René himself, these are now recognized as the work of Barthélemy d’Eyck, who often worked for René. The Cuer d’amour espris follows the long tradition inaugurated by the Roman de la Rose in presenting an allegorical dream-vision. Here, the protagonist, accompanied by Désir, embarks on a difficult and ultimately futile quest to obtain the favours of his beloved, known as Douce Merci. It...

Clément Marot élève de Jean : le modèle des récits de formation allégoriques

Lorsque Clément Marot raconte sa formation au métier d’écrivain auprès de son père, dans L’Enfer, l’épître « Au Roy » de La Suite et L’Eglogue au Roy, soubs les noms de Pan, &amp; Robin, son récit se fait souvent fictif. Ces entorses à la vérité autobiographique correspondent en fait à la réécriture de topoï issus des récits de formation allégoriques. Marot mobilise ces topoï à des fins rhétoriques – lorsqu’il se défend ou réclame des biens – mais aussi esthétiques – car ils servent au poète à redéfinir son art et l’exercice même du métier d’écrivain courtisan.

The Arts of Disruption: Allegory and “Piers Plowman.” by Nicolette Zeeman

Reviewed by: The Arts of Disruption: Allegory and “Piers Plowman.” by Nicolette Zeeman Rebecca Davis Nicolette Zeeman. The Arts of Disruption: Allegory and “Piers Plowman.” Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. xiii, 432. $90.00. Nicolette Zeeman’s ambitious new book is an apt sequel to her first, “Piers Plowman” and the Medieval Discourse of Desire (Cambridge, 2006). Here again Piers Plowman is the hub of a teeming intellectual and literary history that encompasses classical rhetoric and ethical writings, Latin pastoralia, and allegorical narratives in French and English. Also like the earlier book, Zeeman’s latest study uncovers the deep structural workings of the poem through careful attention to its recurrent forms and, crucially, by placing Langland’s poetic practice in a rich context of contemporary discourses. Piers Plowman, notoriously, challenges students and scholars alike to get a sense of their footing in the poem, to determine which of the poem’s numerous speakers are trustworthy, and which are suspect. More than any other study I have read, The Arts of Disruption explains how and why [End Page 360] Langland creates these peculiarly disorienting effects, and it is sure to change future conversations about the poem. Equally important, however, is its contribution to the wider field of medieval literary studies, for here Zeeman offers a theory of allegory as a “disruptive art” whose implications are by no means limited to Piers Plowman. Against the tendency even among sophisticated readers to understand allegory as a binary set with a “controlling discourse,” she defines allegory in more capacious terms as a contingent and dynamic relation, one that, as the ensuing chapters make clear, transcends genre. For Zeeman, allegory emerges at “the confluence of any two or more relatively distinct and mutually commenting discourses, each of which nuances, refigures and redirects, but may also unpack, critique, and even contradict, the others present” (7–8). Zeeman’s chief interest is personification and the associated genres of dialogue and debate; but as the later parts of the book demonstrate, Zeeman’s supple definition of allegory as a “disruptive art” encompasses a broad range of literary activities. “Qualification and even negation must be its mode,” she writes, “because all descriptions exclude even as they include, every formulation is capable of becoming a complacency, and words always demand more words. Allegory is a response to the contingency and multi-dimensionality of being in the world” (2). Setting out to locate these hallmarks of disruptive allegory, the book traces five “conflictual structures” that are marked by “some form of diegetic tension, conflict, or internal contradiction” (1). These five structures are found throughout the broader medieval allegorical tradition as well as in Piers Plowman. Intricately organized, the book is divided into five two-chapter parts that correspond to the five allegorical structures. The first three parts begin with a chapter devoted to the allegorical tradition and then, in a paired chapter, trace its presence in Piers Plowman. In the last two parts, Zeeman discusses Piers Plowman in each chapter, interweaving discussion of the poem with discussion of the larger allegorical tradition. In Part 1, Zeeman introduces the trope of paradiastole, a rhetorical technique in which vices are “redescribed” as virtues, and vice versa. Paradiastole developed in classical legal settings, and is known to have resur-faced in early modern rhetoric, but Zeeman presents ample evidence for its continued use in medieval allegory and pastoral and devotional writing: “What had originally been primarily a Classical rhetorical technique . . . became in the Middle Ages part of a wide-ranging body of psychological [End Page 361] and ethical thought about the subtler manifestations of hypocrisy and self-deception” (38). Chapter 1, “The Hypocritical Figure,” identifies a particular type of allegorical personification that arises from the practice of paradiastole. “The hypocritical figure,” Zeeman writes, “is marked by various forms of tension, discrepancy, or slippage so as to reveal hidden corruption, but also other more insidious problems of decline, formalism, or complacency” (3). The chapter ranges widely, tracing paradiastole from Latin pastoral and devotional texts such as Gregory the Great’s Regula pastoralis, to narrative allegory, from Prudentius’s Psychomachia, to Guillaume de Deguileville’s Pelerinage...

Composing History: National Identities and the English Masque Revival, 1860–1920 by Deborah Heckert

Reviewed by: Composing History: National Identities and the English Masque Revival, 1860–1920 by Deborah Heckert Christopher Little Composing History: National Identities and the English Masque Revival, 1860–1920. By Deborah Heckert. (Music in Britain, 1600–2000.) Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 2018. [ix, 238 p. ISBN 9781783272075 (hardcover), $99.] Illustrations, bibliography, index. Deborah Heckert's Composing History is a valuable contribution to scholarship on English music. As its subtitle indicates, it is an exploration of musical and cultural revival of the masque genre in Great Britain. It is also an interrogation of English nationalism at the turn of the twentieth century. Heckert structures her monograph so that the former becomes a series of case studies of the latter. She succeeds in balancing the two subjects, as well as the format of context and case study in each chapter, so that the monograph feels much longer and weightier than its slim two hundred pages. Heckert intertwines the topics of masque revival and English national identity through the concept of "invented tradition" (p. 4), drawing on the work of Eric Hobsbawm. She applies his idea of the reinvention of tradition for new social or cultural effect within each chapter, first to particular masques either revived or newly composed during the latter half of the nineteenth century and then to the broader revival of British music during the same period, known as the English Musical Renaissance. To untangle these topics for the purposes of review, Heckert's historiography of the masque explains which features were retained and which were reinvented for contemporary British audiences. The masque originated as an Elizabethan court entertainment, a musical and dramatic spectacle centered around dances performed by the professional company of "masquers," then joined by select members of the court in the final "revels." The story, often slight, consisted of historical or allegorical narratives designed to reify the monarchy and reinforce existing social hierarchy. Important characters arrived onstage in grand entrance processions or underwent spectacular transformation scenes. Dangerous progressive elements were put to flight by the restoration of tradition, history, or a goodness mythologically derived. The courtly masque did not survive the seventeenth century, and two hundred years or so separate its "golden age" from its revival. Rediscovery of the masque began in 1840 as a way to celebrate the marriage of Victoria, Queen of Great Britain, and Albert, Prince Consort of Victoria. Heckert notes that this was an opportunity to connect the masque's "impressive pedigree" to the present monarchy as well as to "recapture the masque as a nostalgic, nationalistic genre" (p. 43). Heckert dates the revival of the masque proper to another royal wedding, that of Albert, Prince of Wales, to Princess Alexandra of Denmark in 1863, celebrated by two newly composed—and rival—masques. As performance opportunities and public interest in the historical genre grew, its audience and purpose changed. It became a genre that spoke to the nation as a whole, straddling high and popular cultures through its inclusion in "rational recreation" (p. 140) aimed at uplifting the new—and newly restless—urban working class. By the end of the century, Heckert argues, the now-reinvented genre became a site where conflicting arguments about an increasingly uneasy English national identity could be played out. Economic and naval challenges from Germany, jingoism and military embarrassment in the Boer War, and social unrest, represented by the success of the Labour Party in the 1905 elections, all contributed [End Page 102] to a desire for a stable "English" identity. The status of the masque as a "historical genre" (p. 14) having "traditional associations with nationalism and patriotism" (p. 24) allowed its dramatic and musical representations of England's past to, as Heckert describes, "forcefully [communicate] messages about England's modern, industrial, and imperialistic present" (p. 13). The contemporaneous revival of national music known as the English Musical Renaissance also sought to address these issues. Heckert devotes much of her contextual discussions to a critique of this movement. Perhaps most fruitfully, she explodes the unity of purpose and organic growth attributed to it by later authors, such as Frank Howes and Michael Trend, by tracing how the goals of the Renaissance changed as members of its founding generation...

“True peace of mind” allegorical narrative as a tool of moral (trans)formation in J. A. Comenius’s Labyrinth

Abstract Labyrinth of the world and paradise of the heart belongs to the jewels of Czech literature. The author – Jan Amos Comenius – consciously uses allegorical narrative for didactic purposes – mainly for his own moral self-reflection in the face of suffering. His method proved to be very effective. The goal of this text is to explore the potential of the literary method from the perspective of moral (trans)formation. The key question is: How did Comenius convey the moral content of his “lesson” in the Labyrinth? Or in general: How does allegorical narrative work as a tool of moral (trans)formation – both for the reader and author of the text. Specifically, this paper attempts to show several literary functions of the Labyrinth as a tool of moral (trans)formation: the therapeutic function, the emphatic function, the imitation function, the organizational function, the performative function and the plot function.

The Priest, the King and the Street Vendor: Urban Allegories in Saul Steinberg’s Strada Palas (1966)

All parades are gatherings of curious collections, but the parades in the work of the architect-trained artist Saul Steinberg are like no others. In one particular drawing bearing the name of his childhood street, Steinberg intertwines two parades that bring forth recollections of his native Bucharest from the early decades of the twentieth century. Utilizing the focused lens of the festival, I will trace a microhistory where Steinberg constructs an allegorical narrative of the city as parade. While the city-fragment portrayed in the image is the eclectic Bucharest of the 1920s, it also makes larger, more important statements about cities as contested places of power, where the ordinary and the extraordinary, locals and guests inhabit, reclaim and negotiate the same places. The destabilizing condition of the festival is extended to the city as a whole, which thus turns into another parade of colliding, yet intertwined, fragments.

Od pravde ka dobru u Platonovoj Državi

On the one hand, we can observe 'Republic' as a Plato's aspirations to establish an ideal community that is led by philosopher as a ruler, while on the other side 'Republic' offers explanations on fundamental issues of man's being and knowledge. Plato will never become a king, nor a philosopher who stands at the head of the state, but that did not prevent him from discussing the dominant viewpoints of justice. By his opinion, justice will be able to save a community from decay. Simplified conception of justice that every good man deserves good things, and the evil one bad things, necessarily raises the question of what is good. Plato determines that the idea of justice obtains the value and usefulness thanks to idea of good. This means that the idea of justice gets its content only after the idea of good. Despite all of mythological and allegorical narratives (myth of the cave, allegory about the sun, the analogy of the divided line) Plato will not give us the answer to the question of what is good, but hi will try to convince us that good exist. The author of this paper examines the ontological and ethical structure of the constitution of justice in Plato's 'Republic'.