Allegory in British Romanticism

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ID: 318144
2026
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Abstract
Abstract British Romantic period writers and critics inherited from the eighteenth century a suspicion of allegory, which they conceived as a discursive, and more particularly narrative, genre. Thus they freely used personified abstractions in lyric poetry without considering them allegorical. Typically apostrophized, such personifications tended to be isolated from narrative action. Notwithstanding the attention it received in twentieth-century criticism and semiotics, Coleridge’s distinction between allegory and the symbol was a marginal issue in its time, Coleridge using it to primarily promote his concept of the symbol as an unmotivated, nondiscursive mode of representation in the Bible and nature. Despite enjoying low critical esteem, allegory was used by Romantic writers and artists, especially in political contexts, while older allegorical writers like Dante, Spenser, and Bunyan were admired. Like Coleridge’s ‘supernatural poems’, the mythological poems of Tighe, Keats, and P. B. Shelley were ‘quasi-allegorical’, simultaneously inviting and resisting allegorical interpretation.
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openalex_W7165586108 Use this key to autocite in the manuscript while using SciMatic Manuscript Manager or Thesis Manager
Authors Nicholas Halmi
Journal Oxford University Press eBooks
Year 2026
DOI
10.1093/oxfordhb/9780192894359.013.0014
URL
https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780192894359.013.0014
Keywords Keywords not found

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