Abstract: Through a close-reading of American literary critic Fredric Jameson's famous essay on Third-World literature, this essay re-examines his concept of "national allegory" and several criticisms of the concept in the subsequent decades, of which Aijaz Ahmad is exemplary. It attempts to show that most critics misleadingly translated Jameson's concept from the dimension of "form" into the dimension of "content" or "theme." This paper proposes an approach to the concept from the perspective of "form" and claims that in the present context of literature and politics this approach may shed some new light on current discussions of the relation between Third-World literature and multinational capitalism. The author believes that this reading may re-activate the potentialities and refreshes political radicalness of the critical concept "national allegory."

Key words: Fredric Jameson, national allegory, the Third-World literature