I had to read it in College. I thought it was brutal and told the professor so. He agreed with me but thought it should be read (in a western religion survey class) because of its historical significance.
My favorite part is when all the Christians in heaven get to watch all the sinners burn in Hell. What fun is Heaven if you can’t see the sinners get tortured?
I have never heard or read any of these, IRL or on the Dope. Are they actually common?
Dang, I missed my 1000th post milestone. Oh well.
I’m waiting for someone to provide a summary at Book-A-Minute.
I’m sure you’ve heard of “Vanity Fair” – see the classic Thackeray novel and the contemporary fashion magazine.
Mark Twain mentions this book in Huckleberry Finn:
It is left to the reader to decide if the Grangerford family’s use of the tome to hold their tablecloth in place is an insight into them or into Twain himself.
The term muckraker also originated in Pilgrim’s Progress.
No. It’s a tale about a guy on a path to heaven or something, told as an allegory.
Hi Lissa! I stopped by to say the very same thing but you got here first. Hey, you know what? I’m going to start a Little Women thread. Come on over and join it.
BrainGlutton, apologies for the hijack.
I don’t think it’s really considered a great classic of literature. It’s important, historically, but it’s not a great classic in the sense of Shakespeare’s work or Dickens’s, for example, which are classics because of their quality, not their historical significance.
I’d have to put it, annoying as it is, in the top allegories in literature, of any language (English for some reason is notable for producing allegory). The fact that people avoid allegories like an overused cliche these days doesn’t enter into it. It’s much like reading Don Quixote without being aware that it was a perfectly structured satire on the heroic romance genre – so much so that it totally skewered it into oblivion!
Exactly. It’s a ‘classic’ in the sense of being a milestone, a historically important book, not in the sense of being a universally loved ripping yarn in the vein of ‘Robinson Crusoe’. A lot of ground-breaking books are phenomenally dull and miserable to read, just because the language and the storytelling conventions are very different to what we are used to. I remember an English Lit class where one of the girls was baffled by Tess of the D’Urbervilles being pregnant, because she had read right through the relevant passage without realising what was going on :smack:
I didn’t know they had in vitro fertilization in Tess’s day. :dubious:
What are some others?
And is there such thing as non-homiletic allegory?
I haven’t seen very many allegories, but Hawthorne (as noted) had some. The Glass Bead game could probably be viewed as an allegory. A Thousand Years of Solitude, likewise.
To some extent, any story with a message is an allegory…
Oh dear, I read rather a lot of allegories in college, and looking through my bookshelves from English 110A, I find a couple. There is Prudentius’ Psychomachia, or “The fight for Mansoul,” which is a story about the fight between virtues and vices in a soul. I have two commentaries on allegorical interpretations of the Aeneid, by Fulgentis (6th c.) and Bernardus Silvestris (12th c.). And there were, of course, lots of allegorical interpretations of scripture.
A good book to read is C. S. Lewis’ The allegory of love, which discusses the zillions of allegories on courtly love from the 11th through the 16th centuries. It’s quite an interesting book if medieval romance is your thing.
And finally, of course, Spenser’s Faerie Queene is allegorical in nature as well. Hah, now I’ve brought it up twice! 
Where is the Fretful Porpentine when you need her? This ought to be right up her alley in terms of expertise.
While modern usage applies the term to any writing in which persons, items, etc. are invested with a symbolic meaning going beyond their actual physical attributes, the classic Medieval/Renaissance allegory was very much in-your-face. If a character was supposed to represent every man, he was named Everyman. If the lead character was a Christian going on a pilgrimage to find God, and falling into despondence, he was named Christian, and would end up in the Slough of Despond. Or the symbolism might be lightly veiled: Elizabeth I might be the Faerie Queene, with her courtiers symbolized by the various knights and such of the FC’s court.
I could write one in which a flaming bush leads his people into warfare in the desert, and it would be an allegory of 21st Century America. Unfortunately, that plot has already been done!
Put another way, is there such thing as an allegory with no message?
And then there’s The Pilgrim’s Regress, one of Lewis’s earliest books, which is an allegory very much in the Bunyan vein.
For what it’s worth, I’ve read The Pilgrim’s Progress and actually enjoyed it, though it’s been so long ago that I don’t remember it well enough to give much of a defense of why I liked it.
I’m here! In the midst of job-market hell, and I haven’t actually read Pilgrim’s Progress, but if we’re moving on to “what are the great allegories in English literature?” William Langland’s Piers Plowman surely deserves a mention.
I’m thinking that The Revenger’s Tragedy (by Cyril Tourneur, or possibly Thomas Middleton – take your pick) might count as a non-homiletic allegory. It’s about a character named Vindice (Revenge), whose girlfriend has been murdered by the Duke, coming up with increasingly clever and nasty ways to bump off various members of the Duke’s household (including his sons and stepsons Lussurioso, Spurio, Ambitioso, and Supervacuo). Granted, the play does have a moral of sorts, but most of the fun comes from cheering on the revenger as he comes up with new and interesting ways to murder people, so it’s not stressed very heavily.
Amongst other things, it’s the setting for The Office - despond indeed… http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/theoffice/slough/
“The Celestial Railroad”