To Realize the Universal

By mapping the contour of Thornton Wilder’s major plays and novels, this book offers a fresh reading of his deceptively unfashionable art of allegorical narrative, and aims to reaffirm Malcolm Cowley’s perspicacious judgment: «(Wilder is) one of the toughest and most complicated minds in contemporary America.» After a review of the history and scholarship of allegory, the author chronologically traces Wilder’s extensive, complex and resilient engagement with allegory, a genre employed not only f