Bringing allegory into the light from the neglect into which it fell means focusing on the wondrous heights of the human spirit in its significance for culture.
Contemporary philosophies and literary theories, which give pre-eminence to primary linguistics forms (symbol and metaphor), seem to favor just that which makes intelligible communication possible. But they fall short in accounting for the deepest subliminal founts that prompt the mind to exalt in beauty, virtue, transcending aspiration.
The present, rich collection shows how allegory, incorporating the soaring of the spirit, offers highlights for culture, with its fluctuations and transformation. This collective effort, rich in ideas and intuitions and covering a vast range of cultural manifestations, is a pioneering work, retrieving the vision of the exalted human spirit, bringing together literature, theatre, music and painting in a variety of revealing perspectives.
The authors include: M. Kronegger, Ch. Raffini, J. Smith, J.B. Williamson, H. Ross, M.F. Wagner, F. Divorne, L. Oppenheim, D.K. Heckerl, N. Campi de Castro, P. Saurez Pascual, M. Alfaro Amieiro, H. Fletcher Thompson, R.J. Wilson III, and A. Stensaas.
For specialists, students and workers in philosophy, comparative literature, aesthetic phenomenologists and historians of art.

Autorentext
Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka is a Polish-born American philosopher, one of the most important and continuously active contemporary phenomenologists, founder and president of "The World Phenomenology Institute".

Inhalt
I.- Allegory and Maxim: Power and Faith, Passions and Virtues.- Allegory and the Dramatic Foundations of the Medieval Theater.- Balzac's Allegories of Energy in La Comédie Humaine.- Oracle et allégorie dans l'Andromède de Pierre Corneille.- Allegory Then and Now: The Physician and Disease.- Michael Drayton's 'Ideas' and the 'Where' and the 'Whence' of Allegory.- II.- Les Conquêtes de la Toison d'or of 1661 and 1683: The Breakdown of the Sun Allegory.- Le jeu allégorique chez Poussin: Les Putti comme emblème dans Tancrède et Herminie (Birmingham).- Michel Butor's L'Embarquement de la Reine de Saba: An Allegorical Undoing of Aesthetic Experience.- Paul de Man and the Question of 'Domination Free' Allegory.- Allegory, You Are Woman.- III.- L'allégorie du mal. Deux époques, deux perspectives.- From Metaphor to Matter: Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and the Subject of Sight.- Paranoia and the Aesthetics of Chaos in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow.- Metaphoric and Metonymic Allegory: Ricoeur, Jakobson, and the Poetry of W. B. Yeats.- The Transformed and Transforming Image in the Shift from Print to Digital Culture.- IV.- Billy Budd: An Allegory on the Rights of Man.- Political Allegory: Bakhtin, Jameson and Birago Diop's Les Contes d'Amadou Koumba.- The Myth of the Fall and Walker Percy's Will Barrett.- The Possibility of a Phenomenology of the Text. From and Against Postmodernism.- Gustav Mahler's Ich binder Welt abhanden gekommen as Song and Symphonic Movement: Abduction, Over-Coding, and Catachresis.- Madana (the Mythical Love-God) in Kalidasa and Tagore.- Annex.- Freedom and Creativity.- Index of Names.