Anchorhead said:skyjedi2005 said:books that have no topical allegory whatsoever....like Tolkien's lord of the rings.
Lord Of The Rings is one of the most famous pieces of allegorical fiction there is.
I've read before where Tolkien claimed to hate allegory - he was either deluded, or a hypocrite. Lord Of The Rings is a thinly-veiled allegorical piece about how the industrial revolution destroyed bucolic England. It's almost nothing but allegory. Arguably, it's know as much for it's message as it is for it's story.
But are you sure that is what it is really about, or just something many people have read into it that just happens to make sense, despite the author's claims to the contrary (i.e. is that being read into it rather than being read out of it?) I could be way off here, but I have never had any problem believing that Tolkien really did write Lord of the Rings allegory free (as he claims he did). Obviously every writer writes personal experiences and views into his works, it is unavoidable, you can only really write about what you know and from your own perspective. I just don't see how it is even possible for a writer to delude himself out of truly understanding what he himself actually wrote about.
Since I was a teenager it has been my hobby to write short stories, most of them totally suck I am sure, but I would continuously crank them out anyway; they have always been my emotional outlet. Sometimes my stories are pretty vague that I feel I cannot even definitively pin down what they are about. A few years ago I let my wife read a few of my old stories and found it very interesting to hear her interpretations of the things I wrote; many of the conclusions she came to were nowhere near my line of thinking during the time I wrote them, yet her interpretations always fit my stories like a glove. Why? Because while rummaging through a chest filled with gloves she just happened to find the one pair that fit? No, because her mind wove the glove around my story, ultimately resulting in an interpretation that seems perfectly plausable, but yet had absolutely nothing to do with what I was writing about.
Despite being a literary fanatic, I have always disliked my high school and university literature courses. The professor stand before the class and explains to us the meaning of the things we have read. Sometimes the writers intentions are very clear, and you can definitively pin down exactly what they wrote about, but more often than not things are pretty open. Yet in every literature class I have been party to, the instructor will tell you exactly what was being written about with 100% certainty, regardless of the fact that the author has been dead for one hundred years and never left a personal commentary on their work. A little bit of historical and social research of the author's time, and they feel they have definitively unlocked the meaning of that author's every word.
I certainly agree every author has a message of some sort or the other in his writing, and I feel those messages can be gleamed by anyone who picks up their work and reads it, I just don't feel it is always possible to know exactly what the author wrote about unless he specifically explained it himself.