Allegory Studies

Allegory Studies: Contemporary Perspectives collects some of the most compelling current work in allegory studies, by an international team of researchers in a range of disciplines and specializations in the humanities and cognitive sciences. The volume tracks the subject across disciplinary, cultural, and period-based divides, from its shadowy origins to its uncertain future, and from the rich variety of its cultural and artistic manifestations to its deep cognitive roots. Allegory is everything we already know it to be: a mode of literary and artistic composition, and a religious as well as secular interpretive practice. As this volume attests, however, it is much more than that-much more than a sum of its parts. Collectively, the phenomena we now subsume under this term comprise a dynamic cultural force which has left a deep imprint on our history, whose full impact we are only beginning to comprehend, and which therefore demands precisely such dedicated cross-disciplinary examination as this book seeks to provide.

"Introduction: Allegory Past and Present"
Vladimir Brljak
Chapter 1
"Invoking the Other: Allegory in Theory, from Demetrius to de Man"
Michael Silk
Chapter 2
"The Failures of Allegory and the Allegory of Failure: Dislocation, Time and Subjectivity, c.1230-1600"
Marco Nievergelt
Chapter 3
Painted Allegory's Fortunes in Seventh-Century Antwerp
Lisa Rosenthal
Chapter 4
"Stoics, Origen, Bacon: On the Interconnections of Physics and Allegory"
Kristen Poole
Chapter 5
"Allegory, Ambiguity, Accommodation"
Anthony Ossa-Richardson
Chapter 6
"'Consigned to a Florida for tropes': Theorizing Enlightenment Allegory"
Jason J. Gulya
Chapter 7
"Late Modernist Allegory and the Psychedelic Experience"
Maria Cichosz
Chapter 8
"Allegory and the Work of Aboriginal Dreaming/Law/Lore"
Brenda Machosky
Chapter 9
"Allegory and Bodily Imagination"
Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr. and Lacey Okonski
"Afterword: The Future of Allegory"
Glenn W. Most