Lamming, George (Vol. 144) - Avis G. McDonald (essay date 1987)
Avis G. McDonald (essay date 1987)
SOURCE: “‘Within the Orbit of Power’: Reading Allegory in George Lamming's Natives of My Person,” in Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Vol. 22, No. 1, 1987, pp. 73-86.
[In the following essay, McDonald examines the symbolic representations contained in Natives of My Person.]
In the last few decades there has been a resurgence and re-evaluation of allegory both as a practised form in creative writing and as a critical technique in literary theory. To use a current cant word, the valorization by Goethe and Coleridge of symbolism over allegory signalled, if it did not cause, a long eclipse of allegorical writing. At least in critical writing this eclipse is over. Any attempt at a critical reading of a contemporary allegory must be prefaced by some consideration of ambiguities and, indeed, paradoxes in current conceptions of allegory and allegoresis, of allegorical writing, allegorical...
[The entire page is 6530 words long]
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