Allegory in Continental Romanticism

Abstract

This chapter surveys theories and practices of allegory among continental Romantic writers, especially in Germany in the first third of the nineteenth century, such as Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, Friedrich Schelling, and others. It focuses on Goethe’s influential distinction between allegory and symbol of 1798—its origins, its uses in aesthetic and scientific discourses, and its influence in the Romantic period. Despite arguments that allegory is an overly reductive approach to experience and consequent efforts to substitute the richer term ‘symbol’, dramatic and narrative practices among the Romantics generally remained allegorical, and included influential revivals of various Renaissance and Baroque movements from Italy, France, and Spain. The heritage of Goethe’s Faust in nineteenth-century Europe exemplifies the continued reach of allegorical representation into the age of realism.