Allegory in Contemporary ‘Christian Fiction’

Abstract

Contemporary Christian fiction embodies the imaginative vernacular of evangelical culture as it grapples with the anxieties of Christian faith in a post-Christian environment. Though avoiding personification allegory and instead visualizing or ‘real-izing’ the Christian supernatural within mundane modern reality, it invokes a complex, if obscured, structure of allegoresis in which it enables readers to forge emotionally immediate identifications with particular-yet-typical characters and events. It does so by integrating moral (tropological), and sometimes eschatological interpretations of scripture within a framework of Biblical typology that normalizes a literal-historical view of scripture in relation to human history. This helps readers of this kind of Christian fiction reaffirm and strengthen their faith by mapping the narratives’ affectively infused expanded sense of reality onto their own lives and experiences.