Background

In an earlier post, I offered a brief list of paired allegorical and nonallegorical texts by single authors. The idea was to use these pairs to look for the distinguishing textual features of allegory by controlling for as many variables (such as authorial style, genre, national origin, gender, period of composition, etc.) as possible. Or in other words, the attempt was to get as close as possible to the unattainable ideal of a corpus of texts that differ only by the presence or absence of allegory.

That short list was OK and was the basis of the second figure in my MLA paper on “Critical Text Mining.” But it was both (1) too short for corpus work and (2) depended on my own assessment of allegoricalness, with attendant limitations of historical scope. I’ve always felt that the better option would be to build an expanded version of this pairwise list on the basis of settled scholarship in the field.

The table below represents the groundwork for such a corpus of well-established allegorical-nonallegorical pairs. It’s still under development—there are obvious holes and issues—but it’s an outline of where I’m headed. What I really need now is feedback on the composition of this list.

Issues and Notes

A few notes, followed by a request for kind assistance:

• All of the allegorical works are attested by one or more of the following major sources on allegory. Most are attested by several of them.
  • Copeland, Rita, and Peter Struck, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Allegory. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010.
  • Fletcher, Angus. Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1964.
  • Honig, Edwin. Dark Conceit: The Making of Allegory. Hanover, NH: UP of New England, 1959.
  • Leeming, David Adams, and Kathleen Morgan Drowne. Encyclopedia of Allegorical Literature. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1996.
  • Tambling, Jeremy. Allegory. New York: Routledge, 2010.
• From these sources, I’ve excluded works mentioned only in passing or discussed as ambiguous or difficult cases. So while there’s always room to argue about the allegoricalness of any entry, the texts presented here under the heading of “Allegory” are about as canonically allegorical as it’s possible to be.
• The nonallegorical texts are another matter; I’ve selected them myself as potential pairings for the allegorical entries. So far I’ve limited these to works by the same author, but I’m not necessarily averse to well-paired nonallegorical entries by other authors (and I’m aware that such pairings will sometimes be required).

There are two ways to use this list, and therefore two potentially conflicting goals when selecting pairs of texts:

• Pairwise comparisons. In this case, I’ll evaluate each allegorical text only against its paired nonallegorical counterpart. For this purpose, it’s not especially important where the two texts fall on the imagined spectrum of allegoricalness, only that they be well separated from one another on it. But it is important that the two members of the pair are otherwise as similar as possible.
• Corpus comparisons. On the other hand, I’ll also want to compare the features of the allegorical texts taken together against those of the collected nonallegorical texts. For this purpose what’s important is to avoid cases in which any of the allegorical or nonallegorical entries stray too far toward the opposite category, even if they’re significantly different from their pairmates. But it’s not so crucial that any one pair be especially well matched in content, style, etc.; the two corpora just need to be similar in overall composition.

Action Item

So what I’m looking for is feedback on the suitability of the nonallegorical items that are currently listed below, plus suggestions for appropriate texts where none is given.

The ideal case it to find a firmly nonallegorical text by the same author for each of the allegorical entries, but where that’s not possible, the next best solution is probably a text of similar origin, style, length, subject matter, form, and so forth. This will never be perfect, but the closer the match—while still maintaining good relative and absolute separation on the allegorical continuum—the better.

I’d also love to know about potential issues or complications concerning any of these texts and pairings.

Oh, and one other constraint: I need to be able to get my hands on electronic versions of whatever texts I’m going to use; this makes anything published after 1923 difficult (though not strictly impossible).

Massive thanks in advance to any and all who care to comment. The comments section below is probably the easiest way to leave feedback, or you can email me by clicking the “About” link (over on the lefthand side).

The Table: Allegorical and Nonallegorical Text Pairs Grouped by Era