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.