Concepto

Allegory. An allegory is a narrative, whether in prose or verse, in which the agents and actions, and sometimes the setting as well, are contrived by the author to make coherent sense on the“literal,” or primary, level of signification… Allegory is a narrative strategy which may be employed in any literary form or genre… Sustained allegory was a favorite form in the Middle Ages, when it producedmasterpieses, especially in the verse-narrative mode of the dream vision, in which the narrator falls asleep and experiences an allegoric dream; this mode includes, in the fourteenth century, Dante’sDivine Comedy, the French Roman de la Rose, Chaucer’s House of Fame… (M. H. Abrams, A glossary of Literary Terms, Harcourth Brace College Publishers, 1999 seventh edition, p. 5).

Exemplum. Anexemplum is a story told as a particular instance of the general theme in a religious sermon. The device was popular in the Middle Ages, when extensive collections of exempla, some historical and somelegendary, were prepared for use by preachers. In Chaucer’s “The Pardoner’s Tale,” the Pardoner, preaching on the theme “Greed is the root of all evil,” incorporates as exemplum the tale of the threedrunken revelers who set out to find Death and find a heap of gold instead, only after all to find Death when they kill one another in the attempt to gain sole possession of the treasure. By extension theterm “exemplum” is also applied to tales used in a formal, though nonreligious, exhortation (M. H. Abrams, A glossary of Literary Terms, Harcourth Brace College Publishers, 1999: 7).

Parody: Theimitative use of the words, style, attitude, tone and ideas of an author in such a way as to make them ridiculous. This is usually achieved by exaggerating certain traits, using more or less the sametechnique as the cartoon caricaturist. In fact, a kind of satirical mimicry. As a branch of satire its purpose may be corrective as well as derisive… (Cuddon, A Dictionary of Literary Terms and...