Rereading Allegory

'...a useful literary history of allegory and an exploration of what distinguishes allegorical narratives as a distinct genre.' - Andrew Hadfield, Times Literary Supplement ;Rereading Allegory takes the form of an exploration of a new consensus in genre theory. Following the comments of theorists such as Jacques Derrida and Fredric Jameson, genre is questionable as an 'essential' textual quality. Generic identity is taken to assume necessary generic differences; discursive plurality is posited as the context for generic singularity. The term 'genre'is used to name the highlighting of one set of textual features at the expense of all others. Genre thereby raises the crucial issue of why one aspect of the text is so privileged and puts into question the cultural interest that are served by partial definitions of textual value. These issues are inescapable in the wake of poststructuralist emphases on textual pluralism. The 'multigeneric' text makes problematic our inherited assumptions concerning the integrity of generic definitions.
The first major study to use the advances made by poststructuralist thought in the area of genre theory,Rereading Allegory focuses on the problematic relationship that characterizes literary texts and their generic descriptions and shows that the dynamics of this relationship emerge from conflicting demands for theoretical identity and textual difference, literary essence and discursive plurality.