This dissertation reinvents the concept of allegory to facilitate a discussion that legitimizes Chinese allegory as a discursive device mediating between Western and Chinese intellectual traditions. I argue that modern literary critics have difficulty accepting the hybridity of Chinese allegory because the discursive framework of modernity limits how they can talk about the relationship between China and allegory. To accept Chinese allegory, critics shift their attention from the Western genre of allegory to the conditions of writing and reading allegorically. I adapt the term “allegory” to discuss the necessity of speaking otherwise because words are inadequate to carry meanings across discursive, linguistic, and cultural frameworks. Reflecting on the institutional restraints of modern criticism, critics can seek an alternative way of talking about literature by becoming assemblers of non-modern literary networks in which people, things, words, and meanings are entangled in chained cultural processes. I trace fragments of Chinese silk in and across Chinese and Western intellectual discourses to demonstrate how to assemble non-modern literary networks where critics can speak about Chinese allegory to envision Allegoria, which addresses the Other by illustrating the world’s interconnectedness.