Book Chapter Reference American Allegory to 1900 MADSEN, Deborah Lea Abstract Throughout its history in the Old World and the New, allegory has functioned in two dominant forms: as a style of writing or rhetoric but also as a way of reading, a hermeneutic. Literary allegory in America is bound up with philosophy to the point that Olaf Hansen, in his book on late nineteenth-century allegory, sees it as a substitute for America’s failure to develop a distinctive school of philosophy. But the transformations of American religion, as Puritan orthodoxy gave way to a diversity of churches and the emergence of a weak New England Unitarianism, also provide a forceful context for the development of both American allegorical hermeneutics and allegorical rhetoric. The major American writers of the mid-nineteenth century, designated in F. O. Matthiessen’s 1941 book American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman), owed much to the colonial New England legacy of allegorical expression, particularly their desire to discover rhetorical means by which the word and the thing might become one. The course of this rhetorical discovery [...] MADSEN, Deborah Lea. American Allegory to 1900. In: Copeland, R. & Struck, P. Cambridge Companion to Allegory. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2010. Available at: http://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:87691 Disclaimer: layout of this document may differ from the published version. 1 / 1