An allegory is a narrative, whether in prose or in 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, and at the same time to signify a second, correlated order of signification.

There are two main types of allegory:

1. Historical and political allegory, in which the actions and characters that are signified literally in their turn represent, or allegorize historical personages and events.

2. The allegory of ideas, in which the literal characters represent concepts and the plot allegorizes an abstract doctrine or thesis.