Allegory

Allegory is both a philosophical strategy for interpeting texts and a literary method for composing them. Scholarly accounts of early allegorical writing have explored the formation of each of these interpretive and compositional traditions. This book investigates the interplay between these traditions at critical points in their development. Relating shifts in allegorical technique to broader conceptual and imaginative problems, Jon Whitman closely analyzes and co-ordinates a range of primary sources in which the allegorical impulse develops, from the Stoic moral essay and the Roman mythological epic to the neo-Platonic exegetical treatise and the Christian spiritual encyclopaedia.