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Information about Allegorical

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Allegory of Music by Filippino Lippi. Tempera on panel, 61 × 51 cm, c. 1500.

The "Allegory of Music" is a popular theme in painting; in this example, Lippi uses symbols popular during the High Renaissance, many of which refer to Greek mythology.
An allegory (from Greek αλλος, , "other", and αγορευειν, agoreuein, "to speak in public") is a figurative mode of representation conveying a meaning other than the literal.

Allegory is generally treated as a figure of rhetoric, but an allegory does not have to be expressed in language: it may be addressed to the eye, and is often found in realistic painting, sculpture or some other form of mimetic, or representative art.

The etymological meaning of the word is broader than the common use of the word. Though it is similar to other rhetorical comparisons, an allegory is sustained longer and more fully in its details than a metaphor, and appeals to imagination, while an analogy appeals to reason or logic. The fable or parable is a short allegory with one definite moral.

Since meaningful stories are nearly always applicable to larger issues, allegories may be read into many stories, sometimes distorting their author's overt meaning. For instance, many people have suggested that The Lord of the Rings was an allegory for the World Wars, while in fact it was written well before the outbreak of World War II, and J.R.R. Tolkien's emphatic statement in the introduction to the American edition "It is neither allegorical nor topical....I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence."

Northrop Frye discussed what he termed a "continuum of allegory", ranging from what he termed the "naive allegory" of The Faerie Queen, to the more private allegories of modern paradox literature. In this perspective, the characters in a "naive" allegory are not fully three-dimensional, for each aspect of their individual personalities and the events that befall them embodies some moral quality or other abstraction; the allegory has been selected first, and the details merely flesh it out.

Examples

Allegory has been a favourite form in the literature of nearly every nation. It represents many tales. In classical literature two of the best-known allegories are the cave in Plato's Republic (Book VII) and the story of the stomach and its members in the speech of Menenius Agrippa (Livy ii. 32); and several occur in Ovid's Metamorphoses. In Late Antiquity Martianus Capella organized all the information a fifth-century upper-class male needed to know into an allegory of the wedding of Mercury and Philologia, with the seven liberal arts as guests; Matianmus Capella's allegory was widely read through the Middle Ages.

Medieval thinking accepted allegory as having a reality underlying any rhetorical or fictional uses. The allegory was as true as superficial facts of surface appearances. Thus, the bull Unam Sanctam (1302) presents themes of the unity of Christendom with the pope as its head in which the allegorical details of the metaphors are adduced as actual facts which take the place of a logical demonstration, yet employing the vocabulary of logic: "Therefore of this one and only Church there is one body and one head—not two heads as if it were a monster... If, then, the Greeks or others say that they were not committed to the care of Peter and his successors, they necessarily confess that they are not of the sheep of Christ" .

In the late fifteenth century, the enigmatic Hypnerotomachia, with its elaborate woodcut illustrations, shows the influence of themed pageants and masques on contemporary allegorical representation, as humanist dialectic conveyed them.
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Titian's Allegory of Age Governed by Prudence, with three human heads symbolising age and the triple-headed beast (dog, lion, wolf) standing for prudence.


Some elaborate and successful specimens of allegory are to be found in the following works, arranged in approximately chronological order: Modern allegories in fiction tend to operate under constraints of modern requirements for verisimilitude within conventional expectations of realism. Works of fiction with strong allegorical overtones include: Where some requirements of "realism", in its flexible meanings, are set aside, allegory can come more strongly to the surface, as in the work of Bertold Brecht or Franz Kafka on one hand, or on the other in science fiction and fantasy, where an element of universal application and allegorical overtones are common, as with Dune.

Allegorical films include:
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The English School's Allegory of Queen Elizabeth with Father Time at her right and Death looking over her left shoulder. Two cherubs are removing the weighty crown from her tired head.


Allegorical artworks include:

See also

External links

Further reading

Greek}}} 
Writing system: Greek alphabet 
Official status
Official language of:  Greece
 Cyprus
 European Union
recognised as minority language in parts of:
 European Union
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representation embodies a range of meanings and interpretations. In the context of literary theory the term is commonly defined in three ways:
  • to look like or to resemble something
  • to stand in for something or someone

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In linguistics, meaning is the content carried by the words or signs exchanged by people when communicating through language. Restated, the communication of meaning is the purpose and function of language.
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Literal may refer to:
  • Literal and figurative language, taken in a non-figurative sense.
  • Literal translation, the close adherence to the forms of a source language text.
  • Terminal symbol in regular expressions and in descriptions of formal grammars.

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    Rhetoric (from Greek ῥήτωρ, rhêtôr, orator, teacher) is generally understood to be the art or technique of persuasion through the use of oral, visual, or written language; however, this definition of rhetoric
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    See Language (journal) for the linguistics journal.


    A language is a system of symbols and the rules used to manipulate them. Language can also refer to the use of such systems as a general phenomenon.
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    Painting, meant literally, is the practice of applying color to a surface (support) such as paper, canvas, wood, glass, lacquer or concrete. However, when used in an artistic sense, the term "painting" means the use of this activity in combination with drawing, composition and
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    sculpture is a man-made three-dimensional object intended for special recognition as art. A person that creates sculptures is called a sculptor.

    Materials of sculpture through history


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    Etymology is the study of the history of words - when they entered a language, from what source, and how their form and meaning have changed over time.

    In languages with a long written history, etymology makes use of philology, the study of how words change from culture to
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    Metaphor (from the Greek: metapherin) is language that directly compares seemingly unrelated subjects. In the simplest case, this takes the form: "The [first subject] is a [second subject].
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    Imagination is the ability to form mental images. It helps providing meaning to experience and understanding to knowledge; it is a fundamental facility through which people make sense of the world,[1][2][3]
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    Analogy is both the cognitive process of transferring information from a particular subject (the analogue or source) to another particular subject (the target), and a linguistic expression corresponding to such a process.
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    In western philosophy, reason has had a twofold history. On the one hand, it has been taken to be objective and so to be fixed and discoverable by dialectic, analysis or study.
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    Logic (from Classical Greek λόγος logos; meaning word, thought, idea, argument, account, reason, or principle) is the study of the principles and criteria of valid inference and demonstration.
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    fable is a brief, succinct story, in prose or verse, that features animals, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature which are anthropomorphized (given human qualities), and that illustrates a moral lesson (a "moral"), which may at the end be expressed explicitly in a pithy
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    For a comparison of parable with other kinds of stories, see .
    A parable is a brief, succinct story, in prose or verse, that illustrates a moral or religious lesson.
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    The Lord of the Rings

    Cover design for the three volumes of The Lord of the Rings
    Author J. R. R. Tolkien
    Country United Kingdom
    Language English
    Genre(s) Fantasy novel
    Publisher Allen & Unwin
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    A world war is a war affecting the majority of the world's major nations. World wars usually span multiple continents, and are devastating.

    The term has usually been applied to two conflicts of unprecedented scale and slaughter that occurred during the 20th century.
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    Herman Northrop Frye, CC, MA (Oxon), DD, D.Litt., FRSC (July 14, 1912 – January 23, 1991), a Canadian, was one of the most distinguished literary critics and literary theorists of the twentieth century.
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    The Faerie Queene is an English epic poem by Edmund Spenser, published first in three books in 1590, and later in six books in 1596. The Faerie Queene is notable for its form: it was the first work written in Spenserian stanza.
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    Literature literally "acquaintance with letters" (from Latin littera letter) as in the first sense given in the Oxford English Dictionary, or works of art, which in Western culture are mainly prose, both fiction and non-fiction, drama and poetry.
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    Platonism

    Platonic idealism
    Platonic realism
    Middle Platonism
    Neoplatonism

    Platonic epistemology
    Socratic method
    Socratic dialogue
    Theory of forms
    Platonic doctrine of recollection
    Individuals
    Plato
    Socrates

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    PLATO was one of the first generalized Computer assisted instruction systems, originally built by the University of Illinois and later taken over by Control Data Corporation (CDC), who provided the machines it ran on.
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    republic, for all other uses see: republic (disambiguation)

    List of forms of government
    • Anarchism
    • Aristocracy
    • Authoritarianism
    • Autocracy
    • Communist state
    • Democracy
    Direct democracy

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    Titus Livius (traditionally 59 BC–AD 17[1]), known as Livy in English, was a Roman historian who wrote a monumental History of Rome, Ab Urbe condita
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    Ovid

    Ovid as imagined in the Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493.
    Born: March 20, 43 BC
    Sulmo
    Died: 17 AD
    Tomis
    Occupation: Poet
    Influences: Dante Alighieri, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Milton, William Shakespeare

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    Metamorphoses by the Roman poet Ovid is a narrative poem in fifteen books that describes the creation and history of the world, drawing from Greek and Roman mythological traditions.
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    Martianus Minneus Felix Capella was a pagan writer of Late Antiquity, the founder of the trivium and quadrivium categories that structured Early Medieval education.
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    liberal arts refers to a particular type of educational curriculum broadly defined as a classical education.

    History

    Definition

    The term 'liberal arts' is described in Encyclopædia Britannica
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