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Letinsky, Amy E.

English

2005

MA

This study focuses on two writers who created allegory in response to ideological challenges following the restoration of the England's monarchy in 1660. For two people who came from significantly different educational and socio-economic backgrounds, John Milton and John Bunyan's allegory contains surprising similarities. Against a historical trend away from the form, these writers sought to find ideological coherence through the mystical allegorical form that provided a sense of a participatory consciousness. Milton and Bunyan's allegory shares a progressive complexity in form as well as similar sites of symbolic instability. Using a Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective, I examine how these writers' shared Puritan end-times revolutionary ideology leads to post-traumatic ideological negotiation through allegory. Their allegory's complexity and dissolution frequently surrounds important ideological symbols (quilting points), especially apocalyptic characters from Revelation. Milton and Bunyan's struggle to interpret these biblical signifiers shapes their allegory and also causes its moments of incoherence.