Allegory: Some Definitions
from Bloom, Philbrick, Blistein, The Order of Poetry:Allegory: A narrative poem in which an intellectual (and usually moral, political,or religious meaning) is to be understood beneath a surface story, and indeed to be spelled out and made vivid by that story. In allegory, characters represent concepts, so that conflicts and resolutions among characters result in the statement or modification of abstract doctrine. Allegory succeeds when it satisfies three sets of conditions:
(a) its surface or literal story is interesting and exciting;Allegory may take various literary forms, but procedure and didacticism of intention are the same in all. (139)
(b) its abstract correlatives are clearly discernible and are consistent in their relationships with the personifications or symbols which represent them in the surface plot; and
(c) the philosophical thesis thus acted out is of wide applicability to human experience.
from Thrall, Hibbard, Holman,A Handbook to Literature:
Allegory: A form of extended METAPHOR in which objects and persons in a narrative, either in prose or verse, are equated with meanings that lie outside the narrative itself. Thus it represents one thing in the guise of another--an abstraction in the guise of concrete IMAGE. The characters are usually PERSONIFICATIONS of abstract qualities, the action and the setting representative of the relationships among these abstractions. Allegory attempts to evoke a dual interest, one in the events, characters, and settings presented, and the other in the ideas they are intended to convey or the significance they bear. The characters, events, and setting may be historical, fictitious, or fabulous; the test is that these materials be so employed in a logical organization or pattern that they represent meanings independent of the action described in the surface story. Such meanings may be religious, moral, political, personal, or satiric. ...
It is important that one distinguish clearly between allegory and SYMBOLISM, which attempts to suggest other levels of meaning without making a structure of ideas a formative influence on the work as it is in allegory.
Among the kinds of allegory...are PARABLE, FABLE, APOLOGUE, EXEMPLUM, AND BEAST EPIC. (7-8)
Dryden's Absolom and Achitophel
Don Cameron Allen, Mysteriously Meant:
...When the Republic of Plato and the Symposium of Xenophon were discovered men learned that the earliest term for "the sense beneath" was "hyponoia." In his essay on listening to poets, Plutarch testified to the antiquity of this expression by writing, "now we say allegorical interpretations." But Plutarch, contrary to some etymological records, was not the first to use the word "allegory"; Cicero equates it with "translatio" or "the connection of many metaphors so that one thing may be said and another understood."
In the Rhetorica ad Herrenium,
attributed
by the sixteenth century to Cicero, allegory is "permutatio," a form of
speech in which one thing is said by the words, another by the meaning.
The ancient term is recalled when the rhetorician Demetrius of Phaleron
defines "allegory" as something that hides (hyponoumenon) the real
meaning. ...For Quintilian, "allegory" or "inversio" is to mean
something more than the words of a statement suggest or to mean something
which is absolutely opposite to what the words convey. The second half
of this definition also covers what Quintilian calls "ironia" or "illusio"
(viii).
from Moses Maimonides: (b. 1135), The Guide for the Perplexed (trans. Friedlander)
If we were to teach in these
disciplines, without the use of parables and figures, we should be compelled
to resort to expressions both profound and transcendental, and by no means
more intelligible than metaphors and similes; as though the wise and learned
were drawn into this course by the Divine Will, in the same way as they
are compelled to follow the laws of nature in matters relating to the body.
. . . We must first form a conception of the Existence of the Creator according
to our capabilities; that is, we must have a knowledge of Metaphysics.
But this discipline can only be approached after the study of Physics;
for the science of Physics borders on Metaphysics, and must even precede
it in the course of our studies, as is clear to all who are familiar with
these questions. Therefore the Almighty commenced Holy Writ with the description
of the Creation, that is, with Physical Science . . . He described those
profound truths, which His Divine Wisdom found it necessary to communicate
to us, in allegorical, figurative, and metaphorical language (4).
Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism:
It is not often realized that
all commentary is allegorical interpretation, an attaching of ideas to
the structure of poetic imagery. The instant that any critic permits himself
to make a genuine comment about a poem (e.g., "in Hamlet, Shakespeare appears
to be portraying the tragedy of irresolution") he has begun to allegorize.
Commentary thus looks at literature as, in its formal phase, a potential
allegory of events and ideas ...