In Bleak House (1852–1853) and Our Mutual Friend (1864–1865), Charles Dickens draws analogies between human beings and bees, which function as an important means to address social and moral problems of Victorian society. This article shows how references to bees expose the hedonistic version of psychological egoism represented by Skimpole’s drone philosophy in Bleak House and how Dickens attacks the evils of insatiable greed underlying the ideology of the middle-class “economic man” implied by the worker-bee analogy in Our Mutual Friend. I argue that the Mandevillian tension between private interests and public benefits underlies Dickens’s allegorical representation of bees.

September 2024: Houliang Chen is a Professor of English in the School of Foreign Languages at Huazhong University of Science and Technology. His research primarily revolves around Victorian literature and culture, with a special focus on the works of Charles Dickens. His articles have appeared in peer-reviewed journals including Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Dickens Quarterly, The Dickensian, Textual Practice, and English Studies. He has also published widely in most of the leading journals in Chinese. 

This article reads Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World as a portrayal of two societies, one primitive and the other futuristic, founded on taboos. Although the two contradictory worlds survive on opposite taboos, the study argues that the social and psychic mechanisms behind the operation of taboos in the Savage Reservation and in the World State are structurally similar. Drawing on Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek, and Julia Kristeva, the article examines Huxley’s narrative of taboos in terms of the dialectic of desire and law.

September 2024: Seda Arikan is Associate Professor of English at the Department of English Language and Literature, Fırat University, Turkey. She studied as a visiting researcher at the Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies at Kingston University, London, in 2012. Her fields are comparative literature, philosophy and literature, ecology and literature, gender studies. She has published three monographs in Turkish: Iris Murdoch’s Novels in the Light of Lacanian Psychoanalytic Method (2014); Cefer Cabbarlı: (Non)Reflections in the Mirror (2019), winner of the Cefer Cabbarlı Award in Azerbaijan (2019), and Doris Lessing: A Philosophy of Life from Marxism to Sufism (2018), which in 2020 was selected as the best monograph of the year on English Literature by English Language and Literature Research Association of Turkey. She is currently serving as the vice president of the Doris Lessing Society. A monograph based on her postdoctoral study (at Fordham University, New York) on “Virtue Ethics in the Novels of Doris Lessing” is forthcoming from Routledge.  

The article addresses the erotically conditioned metamorphoses of the female image in the phantasmatic space of three short stories by Algirdas Landsbergis (1924–2004), in which identity is transformed into an expression of creative fantasy and primal needs. The article analyzes sensations and drives in terms of origin and expression. The analysis focuses on the erotic construction and modification of the body according to the needs of the fantasizer. In the three stories, while the male character experiences desire, his mind conjures up a metamorphosis of the desired body, turning it into a sexual provocation, a physical space for erotic action, revealing the inner workings of the fantasizer’s self.

September 2024: Domantė Vaišvylaitė is a PhD student in Lithuanian Literary Studies at the Kaunas Faculty of Vilnius University. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Lithuanian Philology and Advertising, with a thesis on “The Image and Symbolism of Paradise in Travel Literature by Antanas Vaičiulaitis.” Master’s degree in Public Discourse Linguistics, thesis topic “Pandemic Rhetoric: Perception of Threat in The Facebook Social Media Comments.” The PhD thesis is titled “Archetype as a Link between Consciousness and the Unconscious in the Works of Algirdas Landsbergis”. Her research interests are in the fields of memory, mythology, archetypes, phenomenology, experience and trauma in Lithuanian literature. Her experience includes participation in international conferences, work with students, and developing creative projects. 

Contact: domante.vaisvylaite@knf.vu.lt, Vilnius university Kaunas faculty, Muitinės St. 8, 44280 Kaunas, Lithuania
ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2663-7320

Gabija Bankauskaitė is a professor of the Institute of Languages, Literature, and Translation Studies at Kaunas Faculty, Vilnius University. Her research interests include modernist discourses of culture and literature, Lithuanian literature of the first half of the 20^th century, and the First Lithuanian Republic’s press and advertising. She is the author numerous articles, of monographs (in Lithuania) such as Balys Sruoga – Traditional and Contemporary Conception (2007), Stefania Jabłońska: Woman at the Turn of Two Centuries (2020), of studies in language teaching, and of textbooks. She is Editor-in-chief of the international journal Respectus Philologicus published by Vilnius University and the Jan Kochanowski University in Kielce (Poland). 

Contact: gabija.bankauskaite@knf.vu.lt, Vilnius university Kaunas faculty, Muitinės St. 8, 44280 Kaunas, Lithuania

ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3276-8159

This introduction considers the perhaps unorthodox pairing of secularism and poetry and explores their relationship during the 19^th century. It surveys the Forum’s five essays, which consider how secularism’s multiplicities were negotiated in 19^th-century poetry and how the formal affordances of poetry itself contributed to secularist beliefs, emphasizing national cultural differences as well as points of connection.

Founded in 1831, Abner Kneeland’s freethought newspaper The Boston Investigator was a thorn in the side of Boston’s elite for decades, providing what amounted to a “weekly national correspondence school” to middle-class readers all over the US (French 215). However, while Kneeland’s paper gained attention with controversial articles on subjects such as atheism, labor, and birth control, what is often overlooked is its frequent printing of freethought poetry. In the context of prolific evangelical publications featuring poems aimed at converting and ridiculing infidels, The Boston Investigator published poetry that challenged religious orthodoxy and opened up a space for creative ideological and aesthetic experimentation. This paper examines the freethought poetry in Kneeland’s newspaper and explores its role in questioning religious authority and nourishing heterodox counter-publics in Jacksonian America.

September 2024: Michael Keller is an Assistant Professor of English at Columbus State Community College, where he teaches courses in literature and composition.  He has also taught at Quincy University and the University of Bergen, Norway, where he was a Fulbright Professor.  His previous scholarship has engaged the works of freethought poets, as well as the works of Charles Brockden Brown, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Jones Very.  Most recently, he has been researching the phenomenon of religious cruelty in early American literature.

This essay examines poems about cremation written by adherents of both 19^th-century German bourgeois initiatives to reintroduce cremation and the early 20^th-century German proletarian freethought movement. Supporters of these currents held secularist views. Cremation poems can be considered a laboratory of secularism in which certain secularist truths and beliefs could be formulated and expressed in compelling ways. Notably, these poems fleshed out secularism by paying particular attention to its emotional aspects. The poems discussed point to the existence of a secularist, cremationist emotional community across class and temporal boundaries. The essay contributes to the study of secularist mentalities and convictions in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, probing the role of poetry in establishing secularist themes and positions.

September 2024: Carolin Kosuch is a historian with research interests in Jewish history, secularism, anarchism and intellectual history. After holding positions at Leipzig’s Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture and the German Historical Institute in Rome, she completed her habilitation project on secularism and death in Western modernities at the chair of Rebekka Habermas, University of Göttingen, in summer 2023. She teaches courses in 19^th and 20^th century transnational history, the history of gender, technology and Jewish history. Her work was funded by the German Research Foundation. Since winter term 2023/24, she represents the chair of Rebekka Habermas (December 2023) at the University of Göttingen.

The poetry in British freethought periodicals in the second half of the 19^th century illuminates how members of this radical secularist movement agitated for change, expressed their ideas, and self-fashioned their collective identity as a community of thought and action. This article examines the role of poetry in the National Reformer, Freethinker, Secular Review/Agnostic Journal, and Secular Chronicle. Their editors published lyrical and reflective poetry alongside poems of protest, expressing freethinkers’ social and political struggles across poetic forms and bringing an often-divided secularist movement together. The article concludes by considering what cuttings in an edition of J. M. Wheeler’s Freethought Readings and Secular Songs (1892) tells us about the value of poetry for secularists.

September 2024: Clare Stainthorp is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at Queen Mary University of London. She primarily works on the nineteenth-century freethought movement and their periodicals but has a wider interest in literary responses to esoteric spiritualities and intellectual history. Her book, Constance Naden: Scientist, Philosopher, Poet, was published by Peter Lang in 2019. She co-edited the Routledge volume Nineteenth-Century Religion, Literature and Society: Disbelief and New Beliefs with Naomi Hetherington (2020). Her articles have appeared in Victorian Poetry, Victorian Literature and Culture, Victorian Periodicals Review, Media History, and elsewhere.

The poet and woman of letters Mathilde Blind (1841–1896) achieved her early fame — and notoriety — as a radical freethinker, especially as a translator and champion of David Friedrich Strauss’s The Old Faith and the New: A Confession (1873), which articulates an antitheist form of historical and scientific materialism. Her subsequent prose works — essays, reviews, and translations — confirmed this reputation. But her verse, which makes use of what her beloved poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in The Revolt of Islam called “a subtler language within language,” speaks in a subjective non-polemical voice. Focusing on the poetry Blind published in a range of Victorian periodicals, including Dark Blue, the Athenaeum, Black and White, and The Savoy, this essay argues that these poems express the tension between materialism and idealism that characterize her poetry as a whole, while also illuminating the complex dynamics of secularism in the Romantic and post-Romantic eras.

September 2024: James Diedrick, Professor Emeritus of English at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta, Georgia, is the author of Mathilde Blind: Late-Victorian Culture and the Woman of Letters (University of Virginia Press, 2016); editor of Mathilde Blind: Selected Fin-de-Siècle Poetry and Prose (MRHA, 2021); co-editor of Depth of Field: Stanley Kubrick, Film, and the Uses of History (University of Wisconsin Press, 2006); and author of Understanding Martin Amis, University of South Carolina Press (first edition, 1995; revised and expanded edition, 2004). He has published articles on Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, George Eliot, Mathilde Blind, Elizabeth Pennell, Henry Ashbee, Ring Lardner, J.G. Ballard, and Martin Amis. He is currently at work on a project analyzing affinities and convergences between Gladstonian liberalism and the New Woman movement in late-century British culture.

This article focuses on the case of Andreas Laskaratos (1811–1901), a famous satirical poet from the Ionian island of Cephalonia (Kefallinia) and a representative of the Heptanese School of Literature. Laskaratos was excommunicated from the Orthodox Church of Greece because of his criticism of the religious establishment. Apart from his other writings, a great number of his satirical poems present trenchant criticism of the Orthodox Church and its impact on people’s lives. Laskaratos was critical of superstition in the church and accused the clergy of taking advantage of its social status and people’s naivety. His vitriolic critique focused on the supposedly miraculous icons, religious rituals, symbols, and relics. This article demonstrates how Laskaratos’s satirical poetry expresses secularist ideas that probably could not be articulated otherwise within the context of the strict social control exercised by the Orthodox Church. Viewing satirical poetry as constructive social criticism, the main argument is that Laskaratos’s poetry builds on Enlightenment ideas and that he can be situated among the pioneer secularist freethinkers within the Greek Orthodox context.

October 2024: Alexandros Sakellariou holds a PhD from Panteion University in the field of Sociology of Religion. Currently, he is a Senior Researcher at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Department of Sociology. He has extensive experience working since 2011 as a researcher in European and national research projects and he has taught at the Hellenic Open University a class on Contemporary Sociological Approaches in European Societies (2016-2024). His main research interests include sociology of religion and non-religion, sociology of youth, political sociology, historical sociology, radicalisation, qualitative research methods, history and memory. He has over 70 publications in national and international journals, edited volumes, encyclopedias, and conference proceedings. He has published two books, Religion and Pandemic in Greek Society: Power Relations, Religious Populism and the Pending Secularisation (2020, in Greek) and Atheism in Greek Society: From Orthodox Religious Memory to the Atheist Religious Consciousness (2022, in Greek).