Symbol and Allegory in Romantic History

The “debate” (as it has come to be called) between symbol and allegory has had two lives. For the Romantics, who inaugurated the distinction in its modern form, the symbol was the hallowed device, its superiority lying in those well-known Romantic preferences for the organic, the infinite, and the imagination. These, of course, and therefore the symbol, too, expressed Romanticism’s protest against a reality that it saw as constraining and instrumental. But whereas the Romantics’ interest in the symbol derived from what was, to them, its essentially antimodern significance, the re-emergence of the symbol-allegory debate has taken place under the aegis of an avowed modernity and postmodernity. As is well known, in this firmament the names of Walter Benjamin and Paul de Man serve as the lodestars of a new appreciation for allegory.