Dark Conceit.: The Making of Allegory.

Cambridge / A Boar's Head Book / Walker-deBerry, MDCCCCLX [1960]. First published 1959 by Northwestern University Press. First edition thus; "the first book in English to treat allegory seriously in terms of literary creation and literary criticism." Contents include Foreground; Conception (The Traditional Book: Myth & its Interpreters; The World as Text: Shifting Current of the Ideal; The Ideal of Love: Natural Woman Redeemed; Romanticism: The Autonomy of Art & the Hero; The Object Rediscovered: Signifying the Irrational); Construction (Polarities: The Metamorphosis of Opposites; Dream Artifice: The Familiar Unknown; Talisman and Initiation: Signs of the Hero as Missioner); Authority; Identification (The Expanding Analogy; Irony: The Meaning of Incongruity; Dialectic Transfer: The Idea in Action); The Ideal (The Epic: The Hero and his Cultural Burden; Satire: The Heroic Dethroned; Pastoral: Resurrection of Lost Paradises; The Real and the Ideal Reconciled). Soft Cover. xii, [1], 210 pages, index; 21.5 cm. White paper covers & spine darkened. Copy of Walter R. Davis with a few pencil notes & his ink name on half-title; Good+. The second copy is full of pencil notes, we cannot say whose. Buyer please specify which copy. stock#978x/h.