2015 Theses Doctoral

How Allegories Mean in the Novel: From Personification to Impersonation in Eighteenth-Century British Fiction

Lee, Janet Min

This dissertation analyzes the legacy of Protestant allegory in eighteenth-century fictions. In doing so, the dissertation shows that personifications and allegorically inflected characters became increasingly opaque and vulnerable to charges of impersonation as the novel developed in the early and middle eighteenth century. I attribute the distortion of allegorical representation to the conflicting yet intermeshed interpretive frameworks that allegory and the novel demand of their readers. For evidence, I primarily analyze John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim Progress, Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of a Tub, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, and Henry Fielding’s Jonathan Wild.