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La clemenza di Tito, a political allegory, dramatizes clemency as a central tenet of enlightened governance. The events of the plot allow dark tendencies in human nature to threaten enlightenment values (and Rome itself), but ultimately suggest the futility of rebellion against a virtuous and benevolent ruler. The restoration of these values depends on recognition scenes in which the three central protagonists overcome their baser instincts: Vitellia her jealousy and ambition, Sesto his abandonment of reason for passion, and Tito his angry renunciation of his merciful policies. These recognition scenes are shown to be central to the opera's dramatization of enlightenment themes. At the dénouement, Tito pardons the conspirators, reaffirms his policy of clemency, and exclaims, “Let it be known in Rome that I am myself” — a moment of self-recognition vital to the sense of the ending.

This chapter assesses John Milton's Paradise Lost as a source for graphic satire. The many graphic satirical parodies of Paradise Lost disclose the workings of two different political readings of the poem, readings that respectively function to attenuate and foster rather different conceptions of the Miltonic sublime. The first, and more familiar, regards Milton's epic as an anti-Whig allegory that warns readers of the dangers of opposing the constitutional authority of the sovereign. In contrast to this reading of Paradise Lost, one that looks to it as a political allegory of and for the present, a different and still more complex approach to the poem emerges in a number of James Gillray's mature caricatures. In a manner that is highly idiosyncratic, Gillray seems less interested in conscripting Milton's text as a cautionary tale of rebellion and more concerned with exploiting the generic peculiarities of Paradise Lost for satirical and political effect.

Infernal Affairs presents a story that includes layers attached to traditional preoccupations with Buddhism, Confucianism, clan loyalties, and patriarchal prerogatives, to questions of colonialism/post-colonialism and the issue of “national” identity, and to postmodern preoccupations with the transnational, post-industrial economy, consumerism, and the information society. The trilogy opens up to multiple allegorical readings that co-exist within the narrative — occasionally contradicting one another, supporting one another, or canceling each other out. The moral allegory exhausts itself, and the possibility of looking at Infernal Affairs as a political allegory about the Chinese nation and the transformation of the colonial state emerges. The policing in Hong Kong are described. Looking at Infernal Affairs as an allegory about the legitimate right of the People's Republic of China (PRC) to step out of the “shadows” to participate more fully in Hong Kong affairs for the greater good of the citizenry on both sides of the border may really miss the point.

In this introduction to his volume The Portable Rousseau (1973), Paul de Man focuses on Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Social Contract. He begins by discussing the notion of textual allegory, as it derives from the Social Contract, and how it provides the generalising principle which makes it possible to consider theotropical or ethical allegories as particularised versions of this generative model and thus to break down the significance of such thematic distinctions. He then suggests that the ‘inclusion’ of a deconstructed version of the Profession de foi within the context of the Social Contract is predictable, since both works can be considered as the same political allegory, the first on a figural, the second on a textual level. He also cites Rousseau's novel La nouvelle Héloïse as a textural allegory like the Social Contract and not like the Profession de foi.

This chapter examines the presentation of political themes in Franz Kafka's novel Amerika. It suggests that Argentine political theorist Ernesto Laclao played a role in addressing political issues in literature. It analyzes the parallelism between a specific set of affairs prevailing in Kafka's day and the work that embodied his response to multiple and multifaceted factors. It suggests that the political thematics and allegory of the novel are endowed with a full range of psychoanalytical parameters.

Roger Boyle's Parthenissa, published serially throughout the 1650s, is one of a group of mid seventeenth-century British prose romances that share a penchant for political allegory. Most mid-century romance became obscure within a few years of the Restoration, but Parthenissa was read well into the eighteenth century, when by conventional literary history its outmoded genre would seem to have been replaced by the more sophisticated and entertaining form of the novel. Doubtless part of the attraction of Parthenissa's generically typical roman à clef form was the access it seemed to promise to the inside story of Boyle's political career. But Parthenissa is also intensely self-conscious about literary form and interpretation, and at several moments it begins to construct a model for prose narrative structure that in retrospect turns out to have been oddly modern.

This chapter develops the previous chapter's concerns, describing the borderlands setting of Joel Coen's No Country for Old Men as a term of both geographical and ideological reference. It also develops the theme of America's national identity in relation to the Western. It does this through recourse to The Searchers, as well as to more recent films with a contemporary setting. Like Three Burials, No Country has been regarded as a post-Western. This chapter scrutinises this appellation, providing a short account of the supposed historical development of the genre in this direction. It then discusses the allegorical significance of No Country in (de)constructing the cultural rhetoric behind early twenty-first-century US foreign policies. While certainly not comprising the whole of No Country's significance, a discussion of these issues does provide a critical inroad into the figure of the Western hero. The hero provides the lens by which the chapter observes how No Country utilises the Western's generic conventions in order to affect a critique of the cultural–ideological influence that the myth of the West still holds over the political trajectory of the United States in its self-assumed role as the world's figurative lawman.

This chapter is about Zhu Tianwen’s 1986 adaptation into literature of A Time to Live, A Time to Die, a 1985 film by Hou Xiaoxian. Notably, Zhu herself had served as a screenwriter for the film. A political allegory about Taiwan’s coming of age in the 1950s and 1960s, Hou uses the perspective of a teenage boy whose family emigrates from the mainland to Taiwan in 1948, right before the Communist Revolution in 1949. The comparison between Hou, one of the most influential Taiwanese/Chinese directors today, and Zhu, a preeminent Chinese/Taiwanese woman writer, highlights the “literary cinematics” of both artists and reveals competing gender and nationalist politics in Taiwan’s multicultural society.