Metaphor & Figuration
Allusion
An unmarked reference to another text, event, or figure, bringing its whole context along. Readers who catch it get a second layer of meaning, and the borrowed authority arrives without a citation.
"all men are created equal" inside the Gettysburg Address — importing the Declaration.
Don't confuse it with Metalepsis. Quotation announces its borrowing; allusion smuggles it. Metalepsis is allusion at a further remove, referencing through a chain.
In the Reader — 12 excerpts
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk
I heartily accept the motto, "That government is best which governs least"; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe: …
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
…hand and wrist were so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters.
"Justice" was done, and the President of the Immortals, in Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess.
metropolitan distances "above the Forties," of a new Opera House which should compete in
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going
I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.
I was born in the city of Bombay...once upon a time.
Travels with
Devices that share a passage with allusion most often — company reveals character.
Anaphora 8 Asyndeton 7 Parenthesis 7 Passive Voice 6 Parallelism 5 Metaphor 5 Paradox 5 Litotes 4
The rest of the family
Metaphor Simile Catachresis Metonymy Synecdoche Personification Prosopopoeia Pathetic Fallacy Transferred Epithet / Hypallage Metalepsis Symbol Mythopoesis