FABLE, PARABLE, AND ALLEGORY

any form of imaginative literature or spoken utterance constructed in such a way that readers or listeners are encouraged to look for meanings hidden beneath the literal surface of the fiction. A story is told or perhaps enacted whose detailswhen interpretedare found to correspond to the details of some other system of relations (its hidden, allegorical sense). The poet, for example, may describe the ascent of a hill in such a way that each physical step corresponds to a new stage in the soul's progress toward a higher level of existence. Many forms of literature elicit this kind of searching interpretation, and the generic term for the cluster is allegory; under it may be grouped fables, parables, and other symbolic shapings. Allegory may involve either a creative or an interpretive process: either the act of building up the allegorical structure and giving body to the surface narrative or the act of breaking down this structure to see what themes or ideas run parallel to it. Additional reading Fable E. Chambry, Fables (1927), in Greek and French; S.A. Handford, Fables of Aesop (1956); B. Pares, Krylov's Fables (1926); Marianne Moore, Fables of La Fontaine (1954). For commentary on fables, see P. Clarac, La Fontaine, l'homme et l'oeuvre (1947); B.E. Perry, Aesopica (1952). Parable A.M. Hunter, The Parables: Then and Now (1971); Eta Linnemann, Gleichnisse Jesu, 3rd ed. (1964; Eng. trans., The Parables of Jesus, 1966); T.W. Manson (ed.), The Sayings of Jesus as Recorded in the Gospels According to St. Matthew and St. Luke (1949); D.C. Allen, The Legend of Noah: Renaissance Rationalism in Art, Science and Letters (1963); Heinz Politzer, Franz Kafka: Parable and Paradox (1962). Allegory General theory and history D.C. Allen, Mysteriously Meant: The Rediscovery of Pagan Symbolism and Allegorical Interpretation in the Renaissance (1970); C.H. Dodd, The Authority of the Bible (1958); A.S. Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (1964); R.M. Grant, The Letter and the Spirit (1958); Edwin Honig, Dark Conceit: The Making of Allegory (1959); C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (1936); Jean Pepin, Mythe et allgorie (1958); Rosemond Tuve, Allegorical Imagery (1966); Maureen Quilligan, The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre (1979). Pagan and Christian interpretation Kenneth Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion (1961); Henry Chadwick, Early Christian Thought and the Classical Tradition (1966); C.H. Dodd, The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel (1968); A.O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (1936); H. de Lubac, Exgse mdivale: les quatre sens de l'criture (195964); A. Momigliano (ed.), The Conflict Between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century (1963); G. von Rad, Theologie des Alten Testaments, 2nd ed. (1958; Eng. trans., Old Testament Theology, 2 vol., 196265); Rene Roques, L'Univers dionysien (1954); B. Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, 2nd ed. (1952); H.A. Wolfson, The Philosophy of the Church Fathers, vol. 1, Faith, Trinity, Incarnation (1956); Philo: Foundations of Religious Philosophy in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, 2 vol. (1947). Typology and typological symbolism Erich Auerbach, Figura, in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature: Six Essays (1959); A.C. Charity, Events and Their Afterlife: The Dialectics of Christian Typology in the Bible and Dante (1966); Jean Danielou, Sacramentum futuri: tudes sur les origines de la typologie biblique (1950; Eng. trans., From Shadows to Reality: Studies in the Biblical Typology of the Fathers, 1960); Austin Farrer, A Rebirth of Images: The Making of St. John's Apocalypse (1949); R.P.C. Hanson, Allegory and Event (1959); W.G. Madsen, From Shadowy Types to Truth: Studies in Milton's Symbolism (1968). Medieval allegory Erich Auerbach, Dante als Dichter der irdischen Welt (1929; Eng. trans., Dante: Poet of the Secular World, 1961); M.W. Bloomfield, Symbolism in Medieval Literature, Modern Philology, 56:7381 (1958), and Piers Plowman As a Fourteenth-Century Apocalypse (1962); Edgar de Bruyne, tudes d'esthtique mdivale, 3 vol. (1946); M.D. Chenu, La Thologie au douzime sicle (1957; Eng. trans. of nine selected essays, Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelfth Century, 1968); E.R. Curtius, Europische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter (1948; Eng. trans., European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, 1953); Raymond Klibansky, The Continuity of the Platonic Tradition During the Middle Ages (1939); C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (1964); Joseph A. Mazzeo, Medieval Cultural Tradition in Dante's Comedy (1960); D.W. Robertson and B.F. Huppe, Piers Plowman and Scriptural Tradition (1951); Charles Singleton, Dante Studies, vol. 1, Commedia (1954). Renaissance and modern allegory Douglas Bush, Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry, rev. ed. (1963); Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (1928); Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company (1961); A.S. Fletcher, The Prophetic Moment: An Essay on Spenser (1971); Alastair Fowler, Triumphal Forms: Structural Patterns in Elizabethan Poetry (1970); Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (1947); U.M. Kaufman, The Pilgrim's Progress and Traditions in Puritan Meditation (1966); Michael Murrin, The Veil of Allegory: Some Notes Toward a Theory of Allegorical Rhetoric in the English Renaissance (1969); Jean Seznec, La Survivance des dieux antiques (1939; Eng. trans., The Survival of the Pagan Gods, rev. ed., 1953); E.M.W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (1943); Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, new ed. (1968).