Close Readings

Italo Calvino’s novella Invisible Cities is a hypnagogic reimagining of Marco Polo’s time in the court of Kublai Khan. Polo describes 55 impossible places – cities made of plumbing, free-floating, overwhelmed by rubbish, buried underground – that reveal something true about every city. Marina and Anna Della read Invisible Cities alongside the Travels of Marco Polo, and explore how both blur the lines between reality and fantasy, storyteller and audience. They discuss the connections between Calvino’s love of fairytales and his anti-fascist politics, and why he saw the fantastic as a mode of truth-telling.

Circular reasoning is normally condemned by philosophers, but in his 1841 essay ‘Circles’, Emerson proposes that not getting anywhere is precisely what we need to do to find out where we already are. In this episode, Jonathan and James consider Emerson’s use of the circle to demonstrate an idealistic philosophy rooted in the natural world, in which individuals are bounded by self-created horizons, and the extent to which this fits with Transcendentalist notions of progress and independence. They also discuss what his other essays, including ‘Self-Reliance’, ‘Art’ and ‘Nature’, have to say about the importance of thinking one’s own thoughts, and why Emerson had such a powerful influence on writers as varied as Nietzsche, Saul Bellow and Louisa May Alcott.

In Crotchet Castle, Thomas Love Peacock rejects the expectation that novelists should reveal the interiority of their characters, instead favouring the testing of opinions and ideas. His ‘novel of talk’, published in 1831, appears largely like a playscript in which disparate characters assemble for a house party next to the Thames before heading up the river to Wales. In this extended extract from 'Novel Approaches', a Close Readings series from the LRB, Clare Bucknell is joined by Freya Johnston and Thomas Keymer to discuss where the book came from and its use of ‘sociable argument’ to offer up-to-date commentary on the economic and political turmoil of its time.

This episode looks at four poems whose subject would seem to lie beyond words: the death of a child.

Jonathan Swift’s 1726 tale of Houyhnhnms, Yahoos, Lilliputians and Struldbruggs is normally seen as a satire. But what if it’s read as fantasy, and all its contradictions, inversions and reversals as an echo of the traditional starting point of Arabic fairytale: ‘It was and it was not’? In this episode Marina and Anna Della discuss Gulliver’s Travels as a text in which empiricism and imagination are tightly woven, where fantastical realms are created to give different perspectives on reality and both writer and reader are liberated from having to decide what to think.

In The Essence of Christianity (1841) Feuerbach works through the theological crisis of his age to articulate the central, radical idea of 19th-century atheism: that the religion of God is really the religion of humanity.

On one level, Mansfield Park is a fairytale transposed to the 19th century: Fanny Price is the archetypal poor relation who, through her virtuousness, wins a wealthy husband. But Jane Austen’s 1814 novel is also a shrewd study of speculation, ‘improvement’ and the transformative power of money. Colin Burrow joins Clare and Tom to discuss Austen’s acute reading of property and precarity, and why Fanny’s moral cautiousness is a strategic approach to the riskiest speculation of all: marriage.

The Thousand and One Nights is an ‘infinite text’: it has no fixed shape or length, no known author and is transformed with each new translation. In this first episode of Fiction and the Fantastic, Marina Warner and Anna Della Subin explore two particularly mysterious stories in the context of the wider mysteries and pleasures of the Nights. 

James and Jonathan begin their series with Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling (1843), an exploration of faith through the story of Abraham and Isaac. Like most of Kierkegaard’s published work, Fear and Trembling appeared under a pseudonym, Johannes de Silentio, and its playful relationship to the reader doesn’t stop there.

Clare Bucknell and Thomas Jones introduce their new Close Readings series, Novel Approaches. Joined by a variety of contemporary novelists and critics, they'll be exploring a dozen 19th-century British novels from Mansfield Park to New Grub Street, paying particular (though not exclusive) attention to the themes of money and property.

Mark Ford and Seamus Perry introduce Love and Death, a new Close Readings series on elegy from the Renaissance to the present day. They discuss why the elegy can be a particularly energising form for poets engaging with their craft and the poetic tradition, and how elegy serves an important role in public grieving, remembering and healing.

Marina Warner is joined by Anna Della Subin to introduce Fiction and the Fantastic, a new Close Readings series running through 2025. Marina describes the scope of the series, in which she will also be joined by Adam Thirlwell and Chloe Aridjis. Together, Anna Della and Marina discuss the ways the fiction of wonder and astonishment can challenge social conventions and open up new ways of living.

James Wood and Jonathan Rée introduce their new Close Readings series, Conversations in Philosophy, running throughout 2025. They explain the title of the series and why they'll be challenging a hundred years of academic convention by reuniting the worlds of literature and philosophy.

In the final episode of Political Poems, Mark and Seamus discuss ‘Little Gidding’, the fourth poem of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Emerging out of Eliot’s experiences of the Blitz, ‘Little Gidding’ presents us with an apocalyptic vision of purifying fire. Suggesting that humanity can survive warfare only through renewed spiritual unity, Eliot finds a model in Little Gidding, a small village that for a time in the 17th century served as an Anglican commune before its closure under Puritan scrutiny. Mark and Seamus explore how Eliot’s poetics heighten our sense of the liminal and mystical, and how, by ‘scrambling our brains’, Eliot’s brilliant rhetoric subsumes his bizarre politics.

For their final conversation Among the Ancients, Emily Wilson and Thomas Jones turn to the contradictions of the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius. Said by Machiavelli to be the last of the ‘five good emperors’ who ruled Rome for most of the second century CE, Marcus oversaw devastating wars on the frontiers, a deadly plague and economic turmoil. The writings known in English as The Meditations, and in Latin as ‘to himself’, were composed in Greek in the last decade of Marcus’ life. They reveal the emperor’s preoccupations with illness, growing old, death and posthumous reputation, as he urges himself not to be troubled by such transient things.