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Literary Devices
Definition of Allegory
An allegory is a work that conveys a hidden meaning—usually moral, spiritual, or political—through the use of symbolic characters and events. The story of "The Tortoise and The Hare" is... read full definition
An allegory is a work that conveys a hidden meaning—usually moral, spiritual, or political—through the use of symbolic characters and events. The story of "The... read full definition
An allegory is a work that conveys a hidden meaning—usually moral, spiritual, or political—through the use of symbolic characters and... read full definition
Allegory
Explanation and Analysis—Imperial Collapse:
The climate apocalypse depicted in The Drowned World is a thinly-veiled—and highly xenophobic—allegory for the fall of the British Empire. Following the mass casualties of World War II, the United Kingdom had a labor shortage that the government addressed by recruiting citizens of the broader British Commonwealth (the name for all the global countries under the U.K.'s colonial influence) to live and work in London and throughout the U.K. The British Empire had long consisted of a largely White "home island," which enriched itself by enslaving and otherwise exploiting Black and Indigenous communities in distant colonies around the world.
Related Themes:
3. Towards a New Psychology
Explanation and Analysis—Archaeopsychic Past:
In Chapter 3, after Kerans sees Bodkin treating Hardman for disturbing dreams, Bodkin explains his theory of the "archaeopsychic past." According to him, individual human development is an allegory for the evolutionary development of the human species:
Unlock with LitCharts A+The brief span of an individual life is misleading. Each one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory. The uterine odyssey of the growing foetus recapitulates the entire evolutionary past, and its central nervous system is a coded time scale, each nexus of neurones and each spinal level marking a symbolic station, a unit of neuronic time.
Related Themes:
