Introduction

Abstract

The substance of this book has evolved over a number of years. Initially, I became interested in the poststructuralist reappraisal of allegory and the apparent potential of allegory to explain characteristics of American postmodernist writing. From there, I worked backwards, as it were, to the nineteenth-century Renaissance narratives of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, which referred me to the origins of allegorical interpretation in classical and biblical exegesis. From there, I pursued an evolving tradition of allegorical hermeneutics through the upheavals of the European Reformation, and the emergence of a distinctive style of Protestant allegory, to the rhetoric of the Puritan mission in the New World. Much of this earlier work formed the substance of Rereading Allegory: A Narrative Approach to Genre (1994) which, as the title suggests, explores the generic status of allegory. What intrigued me in the course of the research, more than the remarkable longevity of this style of writing and the narrative genre to which it gave rise, was the coincidence between the writing of culturally significant narratives in an allegorical style and a moment of peculiar cultural tension, even crisis. Allegorical interpretation originated in ancient Greece at a time when the sacred myths of Homer and Hesiod were coming under attack from a sceptical audience which rejected the literal truth supposedly represented by these stories.