期刊名称：The new Atlantis: A Journal of Technology & Society
印刷版ISSN：1543-1215
电子版ISSN：1555-5569
出版年度：2011
期号：30
出版社：Ethics and Public Policy Center
摘要：There are those whose noses wrinkle whenever they catch a whiff of allegory in the air. Edgar Allan Poe, in his 1847 review “Tale Writing — Nathaniel Hawthorne,” quips that the best success a writer of allegory can hope for is to accomplish a feat that is not worth doing in the first place. “There is scarcely one respectable word to be said” in its defense. Allegory is obtrusively didactic, Poe elaborates, and thus it disturbs the equilibrium, essential to well-made fiction, between the narrative surface and the thematic depths: meaning should be an undercurrent of subtle force, and allegory redirects it to the surface, where it overwhelms the life-giving illusion of the story.
