Description
Book SynopsisThe only form of monumental artistic expression practiced from antiquity to the Enlightenment, allegory evolved to its fullest complexity in Dante's Commedia and Spenser's Faerie Queene. Drawing on a wide range of literary, visual, and critical works...
Trade Review"Teskey mingles much learnedness with some of the most powerful analysis to which allegory has ever been subjected. It is a rich brew, but entirely rewarding. . . . Teskey has written a remarkable work."—Angus Fletcher, Modern Language Quarterly
"Gordon Teskey's truly remarkable book . . . inhabits as much as it unfolds the work of allegory. One crucial thing this book confronts is that the theory of allegory tends to be so relentlessly allegorical, projecting images of its own work that are by turns purificatory and obscene, images which may conceal or idealize the violence by which allegory works, and yet reveal its scope all the more powerfully by virtue of such displacement. . . . A book so alive to, and solicitous of, its own intellectual obsessions is rare. The author does not yield to any intellectual demands that he has not made his own—an unusual virtue in the current climate of criticism."—Kenneth Gross, Spenser Newsletter
"Reading this book, like reading an allegory, is as much a psychological as an intellectual experience. It disarms the critic prepared to challenge the details of its monumental argument, but not by dismissing contradiction and confrontation. Rather, it celebrates them as the inescapable essense of human life."—Judith Rice Henderson, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature
