What's the difference between allegory and metaphor?

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.

Metaphor


Definition:

  • (n.) The transference of the relation between one set of objects to another set for the purpose of brief explanation; a compressed simile; e. g., the ship plows the sea.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) If figurative language is defined as involving intentional violation of conceptual boundaries in order to highlight some correspondence, one must be sure that children credited with that competence have (1) the metacognitive and metalinguistic abilities to understand at least some of the implications of such language (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Nelson, 1974; Nelson & Nelson, 1978), (2) a conceptual organization that entails the purportedly violated conceptual boundaries (Lange, 1978), and (3) some notion of metaphoric tension as well as ground.
  • (2) Crawford's own poetry was informed by contact with refugees – "I began to think seriously about what it felt like to lose your country or culture, and in my first book, there are one or two poems that are versions of Vietnamese poems" – and scientists, whose vocabulary he initially "stole because it seemed so metaphorically resonant.
  • (3) As the metaphors we are using to conduct it show, the migration debate in Britain is sorely in need of some perspective.
  • (4) The spotlight metaphor seems inappropriate for visual attention in a dynamic environment.
  • (5) In a second experiment schizophrenics were significantly different from the depressives in showing less inclination to select a metaphorical meaning to an ambiguous adjective in a sentence.
  • (6) Three-quarters of the sample was impaired on at least one of four discourse tests (knowing the alternate meanings of ambiguous words in context; getting the point of figurative or metaphoric expressions; bridging the inferential gaps between events in stereotyped social situations; and producing speech acts that express the apparent intentions of others).
  • (7) It postulates the need of all sciences to operate with symbols of various levels of abstractions, including, in a very prominent way, metaphors.
  • (8) This summer, if all goes to plan, the metaphor will be vividly recast: the Globe's stage will itself become a world.
  • (9) According to the old metaphor of classical cybernetics the brain can be considered as a computer.
  • (10) And Crash is an extreme metaphor of the dangers that I see lying ahead of us.
  • (11) The metaphor of clinical work as textual explication, however, creates the expectation that there is a text somewhere to be found.
  • (12) So perhaps there is a political metaphor here after all.
  • (13) My friend had already climbed the same metaphorical mountain that I had just reached the summit of, and when she had reached the top she sat down and wept, much to the surprise of all her British friends.
  • (14) The results are discussed in terms of hemispheric memory for art works, metaphors, and the relationship between the two in the brain.
  • (15) The Oedipus myth has been a central metaphor in the evolution of psychoanalytic theory, particularly the psychoanalytic theory of development.
  • (16) Second, it refers to a metaphor representing the subjective experience of these patients who are unable to find a permanent identity but feel themselves sitting on the fence between a variety of different identities in a borderline position.
  • (17) The Tories, ever wedded to metaphors about killing foreigners, have called this the "Dambuster" moment.
  • (18) As critics of Mr Berlusconi have been barred from the state broadcaster Radiotelevisione Italia, Mr Fo protests that artists are being "defenestrated" metaphorically from the RAI for the same reasons that leftwing dissidents were literally thrown out of police station windows in the 1970s when Mr Fo wrote his work Accidental Death of an Anarchist.
  • (19) But that's not a metaphor: the universality of computation follows from the known laws of physics.
  • (20) Verbal processes later gain access to this graded perceptual knowledge, thus permitting the interpretation of synesthetic metaphors according to the rules of cross-modal perception.