This lively and innovative work treats a body of literature not previously regarded as a unified genre. Offering comparative readings of a number of texts that are traditionally called allegories and that cover a wide time span, Maureen Quilligan formulates a vocabulary for talking about the distinctive generic elements they share. The texts she considers range from the twelfth-century De planctu naturae to Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, and include such works as Le Roman de la Rose, Langland's Piers Plowman, Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, Melville's Confidence Man, and Spenser's Faerie Queene. Whether or not readers agree with this book, they will enjoy and profit from it.

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Quilligan has a number of stimulating new insights into the nature of allegory both medieval and modern. Much of her discussion focuses on The Faerie Queen and Piers Plowman, but she does not neglect Hawthorne and Melville, while Nabokov and Pynchon receive two particularly astute readings. Along with valuable literary criticism, this book gives us an idea of a whole new revival of the theory of allegory.