Allegory and the Reader

Abstract

What does it mean to be a ‘reader of allegory’? This chapter argues that the phrase can refer to two very different forms of agency. On the one hand, there’s the reader as recipient: a person reading a text that presents itself as an allegory. On the other hand, allegory is itself a kind of reading, a way of making legible some aspect of human experience that might otherwise be opaque. If the first approach points to questions of genre (What are the rules of allegory? What are the right ways to read allegories?), the second approach invites one to view allegory in far more expansive terms: as a modal force operative in literature, but also in society, in politics, etc. We trace both approaches to allegorical readership, from the Middle Ages to the present.