You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
"The purpose of this volume is to provide today's readers and museum-goers with a tool for orienting themselves in the world of images and learning to read the hidden meanings of certain famous paintings."--Introduction.
None
Excerpt from The Famous Allegories: Selections and Extracts for Reading and Study This custom of allegorical interpretation was at once the cause and the result of the universal taste for allegorical compositions a taste which for a time modified the whole texture of European literature. To be able to represent one thing under the similitude of another, to personify the passions and the abstract qualities of the human mind, to give corporeal existence to the virtues and vices, came to be regarded as an exhibition of the highest forms of literary workmanship. For two centuries and a half the most popular of all writings was the allegory. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds ...
When we say that love is blind or time flies - making disembodied ideas sound like living beings - we are using the language of allegory and incidentally bringing abstract notions within the scope of the visual arts. Painters in the past, and commercial artists today, have relied on allegory to create message pictures. Once thought to rival literary works or political oratory in influence and prestige, such paintings, with their references to ancient myth, the Bible or medieval astrology, can all too often puzzle some modern viewers.
"The Language of Allegory examines a body of literature not often treated as a unified genre. Reading a number of texts that are traditionally characterized as allegories and that cover a wide time span, Maureen Quilligan identifies the distinctive generic elements they share. Originally published in 1979, this highly regarded work by a well-known feminist critic and theorist is now available in paperback." --back book cover.
Allegory is a vast subject, and its knotty history is daunting to students and even advanced scholars venturing outside their own historical specializations. This Companion will present, lucidly, systematically, and expertly, the various threads that comprise the allegorical tradition over its entire chronological range. Beginning with Greek antiquity, the volume shows how the earliest systems of allegory developed in poetry dealing with philosophy, mystical religion, and hermeneutics. Once the earliest histories and themes of the allegorical tradition have been presented, the volume turns to literary, intellectual, and cultural manifestations of allegory through the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The essays in the last section address literary and theoretical approaches to allegory in the modern era, from reactions to allegory in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to reevaluations of its power in the thought of the twentieth century and beyond.