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).

Is there a “basic” meaning to a text? Or is every text ambiguous from the start? Insofar as a foundational work may be considered to be multivalent in meaning, by what principles do interpreters assess its “literal” sense? How broadly do they construe its scope — and what are the conceptual and historical implications of such perspectives? From antiquity to modernity, far-reaching changes in approach to literality are not just efforts to “figure out” words. Aiming to formulate relationships between words and events, they are efforts to figure out the world.

June 2024: Prof. Jon Whitman is a medievalist whose work explores the interplay of intellectual and imaginative changes from antiquity to the modern period.  He received his B.A. (summa cum laude) from Columbia University; his B.Phil. from the University of Oxford; and his A.M. and Ph.D. from Harvard University.  Long affiliated with the English Department of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he is now emeritus, he directed for many years the University’s Center for Literary Studies.  His publications include Allegory: The Dynamics of an Ancient and Medieval Technique (co-published in 1987 by Oxford University Press and Harvard University Press) and two collaborative studies under his editorship: Interpretation and Allegory: Antiquity to the Modern Period (published in 2000 by Brill), and Romance and History: Imagining Time from the Medieval to the Early Modern Period (published in 2015 by Cambridge University Press).

Ancient and medieval rhetorical theorists gave much attention to discovering an author’s intent (voluntas) from the letter of a document (scriptum). By contrast, resolving ambiguity (ambiguitas) was supposedly easy. But in fact, ambiguity proves the more slippery problem because it functions somewhere between argumentation (a controversy to be disputed) and stylistic embellishment. Legal discourse often tried to impose limits on ambiguity, but at the same time ambiguitas could be quietly weaponized — in both law and poetry — to transform legal and even theological meaning. Where rhetorical theorists such as Cicero, Quintilian, Augustine, William of Champeaux (c. 1100), Geoffrey of Vinsauf (c. 1210), and Boncompagno da Signa (c. 1235), as well as legal theorists such as Henry de Bracton, try to pin down how ambiguity works, poets such as William Langland seem to revel in the slippages that it affords.

January 2024: Rita Copeland is Sheli Z. and Burton X. Rosenberg Chair in the Humanities and Professor of Classics, English, and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvnia.  Her publications include  Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1991); Criticism and Dissent in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1996); Pedagogy, Intellectuals and Dissent in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge 2001); Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric:  Language Arts and Literary Theory, AD 300-1475 (with I. Sluiter; Oxford, 2009); The Cambridge Companion to Allegory (with P. Struck; 2010), The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, 800-1558 (2016), and most recently, Emotion and the History of Rhetoric in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 2021).  She was a co-founder of the journal New Medieval Literatures.  She is General Editor (with the late Peter Mack) of the forthcoming Cambridge History of Rhetoric in five volumes.  She has been the recipient of NEH, ACLS, American Philosophical Society, and Guggenheim fellowships.  She is a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America.  She has been a visiting professor at Hebrew University, University of Iceland, and University of Oxford, and a visiting fellow at the Warburg Institute, London.

Jon Whitman, in his opening contribution to the collections of essays Interpretation and Allegory: Antiquity to the Modern Period, poses questions about interpretive communities’ assessment of the “literal sense” of canonical texts, about the criteria for downplaying parts of these texts in the process of allegorization, about the influence of enhanced allegorization on changes in the interpretive communities, and the continuities of idiom and orientation behind such changes. This essay discusses the answers that can be derived from the Muslim tradition, and, in particular, from the system of Muslim legal hermeneutics known as uṣūl al-fiqh, to these questions, and explores how these questions can illuminate interdisciplinary understanding of the functions of the literal sense in contrasting intellectual traditions.

January 2024: Robert Gleave is Professor of Arabic Studies in the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter. From January 2023 until January 2026 he is British Academy/Wolfson Professor with the research project “The Foundations of Modern Shi’ism: The End of Akhbārism and the Beginnings of Uṣūlism.” His research focuses on Islamic legal theory and practice, particularly legal hermeneutics, and the history of Shi’ite legal thought and institutions. He has directed a number of international research projects exploring these issues. His most recent research projects (concluded in 2022), were Law, Authority and Learning in Imami Shi’ite Islam, funded by the European Research Council, and Islamic Law on the Edge, in collaboration with Dr Adday Hernandez-Lopez of Complutense University, Madrid, examining neglected and marginalized areas of Islamic legal studies.

The reputation of Abraham Ibn Ezra (1089 or 1092/93–1164 or 1167) as a key proponent of the peshat (“plain sense”) of Scripture has been questioned due to his tendency (1) to adjust his exegesis to conform with rabbinic halakhic (religious-legal) traditions and (2) his philosophical readings, especially in the Psalms. Drawing upon evidence from his own Sefardic intellectual heritage and by analogy with the complexities of the Christian conception of the “literal sensew” brought to light in recent scholarship, this study aims to clarify the broader definition of peshat conceived by Ibn Ezra that incorporated interpretive considerations beyond the simplest philological construal of the biblical text.

January 2024: Mordechai Z. Cohen is Professor of Bible and Associate Dean at the Bernard Revel Graduate School of Jewish Studies and Director of the Chinese-Jewish Conversation at Yeshiva University in New York. His research focuses on Jewish Bible interpretation in its Muslim and Christian cultural contexts, as well as a comparison with traditional interpretation of Chinese classical texts. Among his publications are Three Approaches to Biblical Metaphor (Brill Academic Publishers 2003; 2nd edition 2008), Opening the Gates of Interpretation (Brill Academic Publishers 2011), The Rule of Peshat (University of Pennsylvania Press 2020), and Rashi, Biblical Interpretation, and Latin Learning (Cambridge University Press 2021).

The Book of Job, like other ancient Near Eastern and biblical texts, makes relatively frequent use of gestures in its discourse. The interpretation of these gestures is often moot. Is a particular gesture physical, which is to say literal, or (also) symbolic, which is to say figurative? How is a gesture’s meaning in a particular context to be divined? Job’s placing his hand over his mouth, for example, is almost universally understood to reflect his self-censure, his silencing of himself. Comparing other instances of this gesture, in Job and elsewhere, leads to a very different nuance of meaning. Silencing oneself is not self-censure but rather an indication of a desire to listen or hear more. This and other gestures in Job will be discussed with attention to the criteria by which meaning, in such instances, is (or is not) determined.

January 2024: Edward L. Greenstein is professor emeritus of Bible at Bar-Ilan University. He has held professorships at the Jewish Theological Seminary and Tel Aviv University and has taught at the Columbia University Graduate School, Yale, Princeton, the Hebrew University, and elsewhere. Recipient of the EMET Prize ("Israel’s Nobel") in the field of Humanities-Biblical Studies, Greenstein has authored and edited numerous works, most prominently Job: A New Translation  (Yale University Press, 2019). He is currently writing commentaries on Job, Lamentations, and Ruth, as well as other books.

This essay explores the convergence of new emphases on the literal-historical sense in biblical exegesis, the burgeoning of interreligious polemic, and aspects of the commonality of Jewish and Christian cultural experiences early in the 12^th century. It probes instructive similarity and difference in the Song of Songs commentaries of Rashi (Solomon ben Isaac of Troyes, 1040–1105) and Honorius Augustodunensis (d. after 1140), particularly in the Song’s praise of the Shulamite in 6:10–7:11. Their commentaries signal the importance of contemporary interreligious debate, of Christian hopes to convert the Jews, and of expectations for the ultimate salvation of exiled Israel at the end time. Most impressively, they reflect a shared landscape characterized by growing awareness of the other and the need to situate the other on one’s own map of the world.

January 2024: Jeremy Cohen is professor emeritus in the Department of Jewish History at Tel Aviv University, where he held the Spiegel Family Foundation Chair for European Jewish History. He has authored seven books, edited or co-edited another eight, and published some fifty articles – on the multifaceted interactions of Jews and Christians from antiquity until early modern times: interreligious polemics, biblical exegesis, historiography, martyrology, and more. These works include The Friars and the Jews (1982), Essential Papers on Judaism and Christianity in Conflict (1991), From Witness to Witchcraft (1996), Living Letters of the Law (1999), Sanctifying the Name of God (2004), Christ Killers (2007), and The Salvation of Israel (2022)

Combining textual analysis, cultural contextualization, and the history of ideas, this essay excavates the complex “literal sense” of Emma Lazarus’s iconic sonnet, “The New Colossus.”  Beginning with the deliberate misreading of the statue’s intended and acknowledged signification and noting the poem’s network of contrarieties, the essay dwells on the contrast between the “wretched refuse” on Ward’s Island and decadent Gilded Age exhibition where the poem was first read; it goes on to argue that the poem disables the connection between progress and poverty, reinvigorates the rhetoric of asylum, points to the Hebraic roots of American history, and reimagines American modernity as a benign merging of contrarieties.

January 2024: Michael P. Kramer is Professor Emeritus in the Department of English Literature and Linguistics at Bar-Ilan University.  He has authored and edited numerous works on Jewish and American literature.  His most recent book is an annotated translation of S.Y. Agnon’s And the Crooked Shall be Made Straight.