Allegory and Poetics

A close reading of the Psychomachia shows how the allegory gene- rates its narrative action from verbal play and textual allusion rather than in accordance with mimetic reality. A new understanding of the poem's structure reveals the important role of deception throughout. Deception in turn is related to the verbal trope of allegory, with its deceptive transformation of abstract noun into narrative agent. A final chapter explores the analogy between personification allegory and theoretical modelling as cognitive tools. Such an allegory is closer in aim to scientific models than to post-Romantic fictions.