38 Political Allegories

Northrop Frye discussed what he termed a "continuum of allegory", a spectrum that ranges from what he termed the "naive allegory" of The Faerie Queene, to the more private allegories of modern paradox literature. In this perspective, the characters in a "naive" allegory (particularly a political one) are not fully three-dimensional, for each aspect of their individual personalities and the events that befall them embodies some moral quality or ideological aspect; the allegory has been selected first, and the details merely flesh it out