‘Lives and Adventures 2: Irish Men and the Eighteenth-Century Novel’ contrasts the situation of eighteenth-century novels by and about women, which introduced new forms of interiority to fiction, with those written by men, characterised by the precarity of the novel-reading (and -writing) classes in Ireland, and their awareness of living in a culture in which definitions of a ‘gentleman’ were dangerously unfixed. This produces literary forms that are constantly veering towards the unstable and anti-mimetic territory of satire, allegory, and the picaresque, notably Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Michael Clancy’s The Memoirs of Michael Clancy, M.D. (1750), or Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). These works both mark developments in the rise of the novel and, simultaneously, threaten to disrupt the novel’s nascent form. Equally, each of these works involves characters who are in some respect physically impaired, such as Clancy’s protagonist who goes blind, bringing the tale to an end.

‘Lives and Adventures 1: Irish Women and the Eighteenth-Century Novel’ traces a line of development in fiction by Irish women, from the works of Mary Davys early in the century, which are concerned with identifying female agency in plot-structure through a variety of narrative strategies, to epistolary works of sensibility by mid century Irish women writers such as Frances Sheridan (1724–66) and Elizabeth Griffith (1727–93) where plot and form exist in tension, with the epistolatory form allowing women’s voices to speak through plots that would inhibit their agency. Through letter writing and the keeping of journals, and incorporating these elements into the novel, a new form of interiority emerges in eighteenth-century novels by Irish women. By the end of the century, the novels of Elizabeth Sheridan portray female lives of confidence and assertion by framing women’s lives in the context of an emerging nationalism.

This chapter traces how the sensation fiction of Dickens, Collins, and Braddon reveals a central mechanism by which the mystery genre moves from the unruly urban Mysteries narrative to the tighter, more single-stranded detective story. Each of these writers personify the Mysteries ¬in master-plotting characters who are then sensationally killed off. In Dickens’s Mr. Tulkinghorn, Collins’s Count Fosco, and Braddon’s Jabez North we can see caricatures of what, by the 1850s, would have been easily recognized as the urban mysteries’ excesses. These writers’ allegorical murdering of the urban Mysteries, however, allows for the rise of initially-minor detecting characters Mr. Bucket, Marian Halcombe, and Joseph Peters and provides new ways to think about mystery’s radical politics. As fictional mysteries begin to focus more on singular, heroic detectives, the genre’s social kaleidoscope moves inward to refocus on the words on the page in ways that encourage readers to exercise their close reading skills so as to better mind read characters. Also, as specific, unique detective characters triumph – despite their often initially-marginal textual and social positions – they too become powerfully allegorical.

This chapter is interested in understanding the appropriation of literary templates which African writers like Ngugi draw on; their relevance and limits as they travel into new contexts. How does Ngugi, in the instance of Devil on the Cross, complicate his borrowing and what cultural formats does he draw on to mediate and revise received templates? What do these forms of borrowing tell us about the world of the writer? Ngugi has increasingly turned to allegory in his narration of the postcolonial situation in Kenya. The chapter argues that it is not difficult to see why Ngugi resorts to allegory in his postcolonial narratives in Kenya because, as a writer of praxis, whose freedom of expression has constantly been suppressed by successive postcolonial regimes, Ngugi is always dogged by conditions of fragmentation. He was detained for his writing by the authorities and he wrote his most compelling example of allegorical narrative, Devil on the Cross, in prison. As Bunyan wrote The Pilgrim’s Progress in Bedford gaol, Ngugi wrote Devil in Kamiti Maximum Security Prison in Kenya. Both Ngugi and Bunyan fought for the underdog and were scathing of the rich, and they both evoke the image of Lazarus.

This chapter explores Ngugi wa Thiong’ o’s literary responses to detention and exile, focusing on the Devil on the Cross (1982) and Wrestling with the Devil (2018). Ngugi articulates his experiences of dislocation and ideological resistance, denouncing oppression and oppressors in explicit ways. The chapter argues that Ngugi’s adoption of allegorical aesthetics and memoir forms is a direct response to the dislocating effects of detention and exile. Physical confinement and psychological anguish often lead writers to adopt pre-set aesthetics and rigid literary forms. Despite the formulaic nature of allegory and the memoir, Ngugi subverts them to articulate a specific ideological vision for a transformed Kenyan society. The memoir and the allegorical novel testify to intellectual resistance against his detractors, and his determination to create despite adversity. Devil on the Cross, conceived and written in prison, exemplifies the allegorical turn, inhabiting and defying his unjust incarceration. Ngugi’s experiences in detention and exile predict the writing he would produce during this period, blurring the lines between physical and psychological confinement. By exploring the intersection of politics, literature and personal experience, this chapter sheds light on Ngugi’s unique literary trajectory and the ways in which adversity can shape artistic expression.

This chapter introduces the book’s two major claims: that learning to read and write fiction was integral to literate education in the Roman world, and that Imperial prose fiction emerged in response to this pedagogy. Drawing on a wide range of literary, philosophical, and educational sources, it argues that the acquisition of “fiction competence” – the trained ability to identify, interpret, and evaluate fictional narratives – was central to the curriculum from early childhood through rhetorical education. It then proposes an “institutional theory of fiction” for classical antiquity, arguing that ancient fictionality be defined not by genre or authorial intent but by culturally embedded conventions taught through schooling. Tracing the roots of these conventions to Greek philosophical and sophistic traditions, the chapter reconstructs four pedagogical principles that structured how students learned to engage with fiction. These principles centered on deception (apate), enigmatic speech (ainigma), and evaluative criticism. The chapter demonstrates that educational texts and practices shaped ancient readers’ expectations of fiction and that literary fiction, in turn, reflected and contested its institutional training. Fiction in antiquity, the chapter contends, must be understood as a socially regulated practice, embedded in and shaped by systems of education.

The Conclusion formulates the ethical role that I attribute to multi-scalar poetics in the context of an accelerating ecological crisis. I argue that narrative fiction can enable response-ability towards multiple scales of life and scale-bound perspectives. I expand the concept of scalar irony, which I defend here as an eco-political mode of attention that fiction enables for the reader. Returning to the question of analogy, I argue against the temptation to hierarchise non-analogical tropes above analogical ones, and propose that literature’s power lies in its capacity to turn all tropes into sites of epistemic and ethical negotiation.

Chapter 4 discusses the ethical potential of fictional trans-scalar encounters. Richard Powers’s The Overstory (2018) and Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013) confront human characters with unfamiliar scales of existence: the slow time of trees, the multitudinous identity of forest or flock, the accelerating time of climate change, and the geographical patterns of collective migration. Both novels highlight disjunctions between scales as a key obstacle to environmental response-ability, by contrasting a sacrificed location with globalisation’s discourse of prosperity. These stories also highlight the fractures between individual and species-scale behaviour, and the difficulty of relating to the self as species. These fault lines lead me to ask whether allegorical narrative might in itself constitute a hindrance to trans-scalar ethics by smoothing out disjunctions and scale effects. I suggest that metalepsis acts as a counterweight to allegory in these novels. By construing trans-scalar encounters as frame-breaking events, metalepsis opens up the possibility of ethical relation.

The book ends with a review of the long and complex history of feminine imagery for the Church and presents major conclusions from the book’s case studies, such as the remarkable and previously unrecognized continuities and changes across the periodization divide established by the English Reformation. The Conclusion also reviews the analytical method used in the book’s case studies – which is adaptable to feminine imagery for the Church in sources outside the book’s scope – and evaluates the aptitude of the term “goddess” for Lady Church in the context of comparative religious studies.

This chapter opens with the pivotal scene in Goethe’s bestselling novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, when Werther reads Ossian to Charlotte. In describing this moment, Goethe reproduces Ossian’s patterns of rhythm and syntax in his own prose. The effect suggests that Werther and Charlotte share an embodied responsiveness to their reading. Goethe here seems to be drawing upon contemporary theories of universal rhythm and debates about prosody. The idea that poetic rhythm is a sensuous experience that can be shared between readers is then pushed to the extreme in the Roman Elegies, in which he playfully compares prosody to sex. The final section of this chapter focuses on Elective Affinities and shows how the novel’s comparison between chemical bonds and bonds of human affection extends also to a comparison between human relationships and the relational structures of language and metaphor.

This chapter is, for the most part, devoted to an appraisal of Greek art as a school of humanity. Herder applies the model of nature’s force to the work of art. The force that produces the human form in the work of art also conditions the possibilities for viewing and understanding art. Art grounds visible categories of humankind and it renders visible the ideas that make these categories intelligible. Greek statuary is seen as a formalization of timeless categories of human life, but these categories are subject to the contingencies of interpretation. He discusses the Greek idealization of childhood, heroism, the gods, fauns, satyrs, and centaurs. He then concludes that there is no such thing as formless goodness and truth. This is followed by an appraisal of allegory. A text by Johann Christoph Berens is cited as an example of practical moral enlightenment. In this connection, the question of public morals is raised with respect to Homer and Montesquieu. Kant’s pursuit of truth is praised. The chapter closes with thoughts on freedom of thought and the state.

Following the blooming of the Hundred Flowers came a metaphorical springtime. How was it formed? As metaphorical wordplay continued to shape public discourse, the sustained input of creative writers gradually transformed the discussion of flowers to a broader theme of spring. Poets such as Ai Qing wove ever more detailed depictions of bucolic scenes to both comment on the state of the Republic and to join in the word play that was now present across genres of writing. In the process, an ever-expanding circle of writers joined the metaphorical and allegorical debate, including Zhou Shoujuan, who saw the movement as a resurrection of the literary public sphere of the May Fourth era. We also observe the migration of metaphorical imagery from text to visual-culture, as floral scenes and those of spring became omnipresent in magazines and newspapers.

This chapter turns from the question of the Gospels’ literary form to that of their literary formation. According to David Strauss, no preceding understanding of the Gospels shared closer proximity to the emerging “mythical point of view” than “ancient allegorical interpretation” – an astonishing claim left unexamined since his Life of Jesus was first published. Strauss’s comparison of the mythical and allegorical views cuts closer to the heart of Origen’s sense of the figurative nature of the Gospels than any other account of early criticism of the Gospels. Nevertheless, I challenge Strauss’s final charge of unrestrained interpretive “arbitrariness” resulting from Origen’s view. I show instead that Origen locates the formation of the Gospel narratives in the Evangelists freely “making use” of the traditions they had received for their own purposes, freedom reflected in the distinctive (even discordant) characteristics of their narratives, which differ according to how the authors sought, “each in his own way,” to “teach what they had perceived in their own mind by way of figures.” Thus, for Origen, the Evangelists themselves were “figurative readers” of the life of Jesus.

Origen’s surprising presence within David F. Strauss’s genealogy of the critical examination of the life of Jesus ought to stir contemporary readers from slipping into their own forms of presumption regarding when, exactly, reading of the Gospels first became critical or what the term “critical” even means. Strauss’s presentation also underscores the difficulty of fashioning a portrait adequate to such a unique figure and introduces the need to retrieve Origen’s own first principles of Gospel reading. Here, I lay the requisite groundwork for addressing Part I’s overarching question (“What is a Gospel?”) by showing that, for Origen, the term “Gospel,” strictly speaking, does not designate just any discourse bearing the early Christian proclamation, but rather one that does so under the form of narratives of the life of Jesus. The stage is thus set for the more pivotal – and tortuous – question: What kind of narratives are they?

This chapter examines the relationship between English satire and libel law between roughly 1670 and 1730. It takes up the growth of verbal ambiguity and the use of irony, circumlocution, and allegory among satirists such as John Dryden, Alexander Pope, and Delarivier Manley, and demonstrates how the courts responded to verbal ambiguity by refining the supposedly “objective” interpretive standards to be used by jurors. Such standards created mechanisms for delimiting verbal ambiguity and restricting the interpretive latitude of jurors while permitting the crown to skirt technical linguistic issues. These revisions to the law were part of a more general refinement of libel laws, which furnished the government with its primary means of regulating the press during this period. The interaction between libel law and satire had consequences for both legal procedure and literature – consequences that extended well beyond the eighteenth century and that continue to shape legal and literary practice today.

This essay explores two movements that developed in reaction to naturalism and its mimetic logic of stage realism at the turn of the twentieth century. Symbolism sought to represent the unrepresentable essence of the human experience, turning to allegories, fables, and mystical images to conjure spirits from both the natural and supernatural realms. Expressionism likewise aimed at an alternative aesthetic for representing the unrepresentable but did so with an eye towards the epistemological uncertainty of knowing oneself in relation to the modern world. It featured an abstract palette of skewed lines and woodcut shadows to depict the anxious experience of unpredictability, ironically projecting movement as stasis onto an increasingly stylised mis-en-scène.