What's the difference between allegory and fiction?

Allegory


Definition:

  • (n.) A figurative sentence or discourse, in which the principal subject is described by another subject resembling it in its properties and circumstances. The real subject is thus kept out of view, and we are left to collect the intentions of the writer or speaker by the resemblance of the secondary to the primary subject.
  • (n.) Anything which represents by suggestive resemblance; an emblem.
  • (n.) A figure representation which has a meaning beyond notion directly conveyed by the object painted or sculptured.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Byatt said that, while she had not wished to present an allegory or a polemic, the story was impelled by a profound sense of gloom about the environment and indeed about all human endeavours.
  • (2) But the bedeviled foray also works as a potent allegory on the slow, vice-like workings of conscience, as guilt hunts down the protagonists with the shrieking remorselessness of Greek furies.
  • (3) Christians believed, and believe, that the body is not only physical, but also spiritual and mystical, and many believed it was an allegory of church, state and family.
  • (4) In a country addicted to novelty and invention, he was proceeding to supply an instant lore of allegory, myth and fable.
  • (5) They had become an allegory for unhappy love, a foreshadow of Romeo and Juliet set in the Hindu Kush .
  • (6) Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Macabre allegory’: Otto Dix’s The Triumph of Death (1934).
  • (7) Heavy with symbolism, analytical rather than dramatic, it attempts nothing less than an allegory of colonialism and apartheid, one that dares to linger in complexity."
  • (8) But even more than this bravura dramatic writing, the story of Dr Rieux's selfless struggle with the illness, and the different responses of other citizens, colleagues and chance acquaintances, unfolds an urgent allegory of war.
  • (9) Their music has long been free of such unnecessary clutter as metaphor, allegory, and poetic conceit.
  • (10) Bamba Issa took its inspiration from a Disney comic book, Donald Duck and The Magic Hourglass , which UFO felt was “an allegory for capitalism, its arrogance and shortcomings”.
  • (11) Could we fight back against a world ruled by men?” Facebook Twitter Pinterest Armed with a brush … Self-portrait as the Allegory of Painting, by Gentileschi.
  • (12) So he positively enjoyed draping what is, in fact, a chilling allegory of paternal possessiveness and pseudo-scientific fanaticism, in the gaudy fabric of a "romance", just as the author pretends, in his pseudo-preface, to have discovered it among the works of "M de l'Aubépine" (French for "haw-thorn").
  • (13) The Double , it's said, is meant as an allegory: the straight man is Dostoevsky in real life, shy and often awkward; the arriviste is the author 2.0, the person he sometimes wished he was, who is quick-witted and irresistible to women.
  • (14) The sociology, the anthropology, the communication is so important, not like the veterinary or the wildlife or medical sciences," he told IRIN, explaining that epidemiological facts have to be translated in simple ways for ordinary people to understand, by using local allegories for instance.
  • (15) The film, like some of the original Apes movies, mixes intellect and allegory with adventure and special effects.
  • (16) They approached the cold war as melodrama and McCarthyism by way of allegory.
  • (17) Another way of reading it could be as an allegory about the self-destructive consequences of women's obsession with shaving.
  • (18) Clearly it is not so much a kiss he is portraying as an ecstatic allegory of all the copulations he can remember or imagine.
  • (19) She experimented towards the end, not always successfully, with symbol and allegory, and but for her success as a novelist would have been remembered as a great master of the short-story genre, which she always defended for its concentration, integrity and lack of compromise.
  • (20) Somehow the people who create television failed to create television, I believe Erin put it best when she referenced Plato's Allegory of the Cave – a very quick read if you would like to make this evening worthwhile.

Fiction


Definition:

  • (n.) The act of feigning, inventing, or imagining; as, by a mere fiction of the mind.
  • (n.) That which is feigned, invented, or imagined; especially, a feigned or invented story, whether oral or written. Hence: A story told in order to deceive; a fabrication; -- opposed to fact, or reality.
  • (n.) Fictitious literature; comprehensively, all works of imagination; specifically, novels and romances.
  • (n.) An assumption of a possible thing as a fact, irrespective of the question of its truth.
  • (n.) Any like assumption made for convenience, as for passing more rapidly over what is not disputed, and arriving at points really at issue.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Much less obvious – except in the fictional domain of the C Thomas Howell film Soul Man – is why someone would want to “pass” in the other direction and voluntarily take on the weight of racial oppression.
  • (2) Clute and Harrison took a scalpel to the flaws of the science fiction we loved, and we loved them for it.
  • (3) But it is now widely understood this Thanksgiving story is a fictional history.
  • (4) The fact that Line of Duty is ranked among the best TV fiction for years suggests there is no crisis with the channel.
  • (5) The day it opened in the US, three senators – senate select committee on intelligence chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, Carl Levin and John McCain – released a letter of protest to Sony Pictures's CEO, citing their committee's 6,000-page classified report on interrogation tactics and calling on him "to state that the role of torture in the hunt for Osama bin Laden is not based on the facts, but rather part of the film's fictional narrative".
  • (6) After heading for Rome with his long-term partner, Howard Auster, he returned to fiction with a bestselling novel, Julian, based on the life of a late Roman emperor; a political novel, Washington DC, based on his own family; and Myra Breckinridge, a subversive satire that examined contradictions of gender and sexuality with enough comic brio to become a worldwide bestseller.
  • (7) He added: "There will be all sorts of science fiction writers who will give their own opinions on what this means, but we don't want to enter that game."
  • (8) An Artist of the Floating World won the Whitbread Book of the Year award and was nominated for the Booker prize for fiction; The Remains of the Day won the Booker; and When We Were Orphans, perceived by many reviewers as a disappointment, was nominated for both the Booker and the Whitbread.
  • (9) DynaTAC became the phone of choice for fictional psychopaths, including Wall Street's Gordon Gekko, American Psycho's Patrick Bateman and Saved by the Bell's Zack Morris.
  • (10) As a critic, he reviewed crime fiction for the Times from 1967 to 1983.
  • (11) Haki's naivety about English detective fiction is more than matched by Latimer's ingenuous excitement as Haki describes to him Dimitrios's sordid career, and he decides it would be fun to write the gangster's biography.
  • (12) Subjects made probability ratings for fictional others who were heavy, moderate, or light drinkers or nondrinkers.
  • (13) And anyway, if her fictional world is so timeless, why has it gone in and out of fashion?
  • (14) Austen couldn't avoid them, nor does her fiction try to.
  • (15) But the new creative director of BBC Films, promoted to the role after last week's BBC fiction shakeup , seems to harbour no such industry-appropriate urges.
  • (16) 23 May More films to see in 2014 • 2014 preview: thrillers • 2014 preview: comedy • 2014 preview: Oscar hopefuls • 2014 preview: science fiction • 2014 preview: romance • 2014 preview: drama • This article was amended on Thursday 2 January 2014.
  • (17) I think he’s one of those people in life who simply doesn’t really understand the difference between fact and fiction.
  • (18) The problem of consciousness is discussed briefly, including the contrary views of consciousness as a transcendental phenomenon and as an animistic fiction.
  • (19) Critical verdict The Tin Drum catapulted Grass to the forefront of European fiction and since then he has been Germany's "permanent Nobel candidate"; of the remainder of the Danzig trilogy, Cat and Mouse is the best regarded.
  • (20) It is tempting to visualise the yawning gap between the real-life equivalents of the fictional Chatsworth Estate, where Shameless is set, and Green Templeton College, Oxford, where Walker works.