Allegory and Analogy: Teaching with Extended Metaphors

Abstract

A single metaphor can extend far beyond a sentence, and a common literary device that exploits this capability is an allegory. Arguably, an allegory frames all the events of a story inside an extended metaphor. Gibbs (1994) made this clear with a famous twentieth-century English allegory, George Orwell’s Animal Farm. The underlying metaphor of animal farm is quite clear, it is that ‘a farm is a pre-revolutionary society’.