![]() ![]() ![]() In the nineteenth century, the German, English, and American romantics initiated a shift toward the rediscovery of the sacred by a return to the revelatory encounter. The clearest example of this combination of the sacred and the profane is Daniel Defoe’s ‘A True Relation of the Apparition of One Mrs Veal,’ in which the spiritual, which was previously taken on faith, is replaced by spiritualism, which has to be made plausible by techniques of verisimilitude. Although this displacement toward everyday life as the subject of narrative fiction was relatively constant up through the development of the eighteenth-century novel, short fiction retained its primary purpose as the allegorical expression of the concept of spiritual reality. ![]() In the Renaissance novella, the breakup of everyday reality was not the result of a perception of a sacred or mythic experience, but rather a concatenation of cosmic accident and human foible. This abstract distancing from actual human experience inevitably created a generic counter-reaction for a return to ‘the real,’ the most famous manifestation of which was the basic shift from the ‘divine’ comedy of Dante to the ‘human comedy’ of Boccaccio. By the Middle Ages, the revelatory experience had been so conceptualized that true reality was no longer seen to exist in isolated sacred moments of hierophanic encounter, but rather in a fully organized theological framework that it became the task of art to describe allegorically. ![]()
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