A form of artwork (whether architectural, textual, visual, plastic, or musical) whose outward appearance is contrived to suggest a hidden or second order of meaning that is in some sense the âtrueâ meaning. This is often achieved by means of symbols, but there are many other techniques as well, such as personification and trompe lâĆil. Readers of C. S. Lewisâs Narnia books or J. R. R. Tolkienâs Ring Trilogy are bombarded by images that point to a deeper significance, or meaning beyond the surface of the text. In the case of Narnia, self-sacrificing characters like the great lion Aslan cannot but be figures of Christ, while it is difficult not to think of the Hobbits as personifications of that mythic place known as âMiddle Englandâ. For the most part, allegories are creative rewritings or reimaginings of a pre-existing text such as the Bible, but as Jameson, Fredric shows in The Political Unconscious (1981), history itself can be used as a prior text for the purpose of constructing allegory (in his later work he develops a notion of national allegory to describe artworks that use the nation itself as their prior text). Allegory is important to the work of Frye, Northrop, de Man, Paul, and Benjamin, Walter, all of whom devise multilayered models of allegory. Allegory should be distinguished from metaphor. Further Reading: J. Tambling Allegory (2009).