ABSTRACT
Until recently, modern study of literature paid little attention to allegory, unless specialist work was being done on a religious, ‘serious’ writer like Spenser, or Langland, or Bunyan. Reading for allegory was regarded as getting in the way of an immediate response to a text, missing out on its vital, literal sense. The attitude of Mrs Touchett, the commonsensical American in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881), was typical, and still is with some: it likes a plain ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Even medievalists played down the presence of allegory in medieval texts, where its presence could be expected. Allegorical implications in later texts, such as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) or George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) were regarded as special cases. The old prejudice against allegory was both that it insisted on putting one thing in the place of another, saying that A meant B, and that this connection was rigidly, and rather abstractly, coded.
