Introduction -- Allegory and meaning -- Allegory and abstraction -- Literal and allegorical readings -- 1. Classical and medieval allegory -- Allegoresis -- Beginning allegory -- Dante: fourfold allegory -- The veil of allegory -- Allegory and 'Figura' -- Piers Plowman and medieval interest in allegory -- 2. Medieval and Renaissance personification -- Bronzino's Allegory -- Defining personification -- Allegories, virtues and vices -- Allegory and realism -- Allegory and Chaucer -- Spenser -- 3. From allegory to symbolism -- Emblems and allegory -- Emblems and signs -- Bunyan -- Blake -- Coleridge and German Romanticism -- 4. Allegory in the age of realism -- Hawthorne, Melville, Dickinson -- Identity and monstrosity -- Courbet's 'real allegory' -- Urban Allegory: Dickens and Marx -- Baudelaire -- 5. Walter Benjamin: allegory versus symbolism -- Baroque allegory -- Allegory and the skull -- Baroque allegory and Milton -- 6. Allegory, irony, deconstruction -- From Benjamin to Paul de Man -- 'The Rhetoric of Temporality' -- Allegories of Reading -- Prosopopoeia -- Apostrophe -- 7. Modern allegory -- Allegory in postcolonialism -- Postmodern allegories -- For and against allegory -- Allegory versus personification -- Glossary.