Guide to Literary Terms | Allegory

Allegory - an extended metaphor in which a person, abstract idea, or event stands for itself and for something else. It usually involves moral or spiritual concepts which are more significant than the actual narrative.

The term is from the Greek allegoria, a joining of two other Greek words: allos, meaning “other”, and agoreuein, meaning “to speak.”

The most famous allegory in English is Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) which describes the adventures of the human soul as if it were on a journey. Parts of Dante’s Divine Comedy (1310–1314) are also allegorical. George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1946) is a political allegory in which the story of the revolution of the animals on an English farm stands as a critique of both the capitalist democracies of the west and the totalitarian regime that had grown out of the communist revolution in Russia.

see: fable, morality play, myth, parable, satire