The series begins 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. Described as a ‘dialectical lyric’ on the title page, the book works through a variety of formats in its attempt to understand the nature of faith and the apparently unsolvable paradox that the father of the Abrahamic religions was prepared to murder his own son. James and Jonathan consider whether Kierkegaard thinks we can understand anything, and what Fear and Trembling has in common with the works of Dostoevsky and Kafka.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

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In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingscip

Further reading in the LRB:

Jonathan Rée: Dancing in the Service of Thought https://lrb.me/cipkierkegaard1

James Butler: Reading Genesis https://lrb.me/cipkierkegaard2

Roger Poole: A Walk with Kierkegaard https://lrb.me/cipkierkegaard3

Terry Eagleton: A Long Way from Galilee https://lrb.me/cipkierkegaard4

LRB AUDIOBOOKS

Discover audiobooks from the LRB, including Jonathan Rée's Becoming a Philosopher: Spinoza to Sartre:

https://lrb.me/audiobookscip

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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.

The first episode will come out on Monday 27 January, on Austen’s Mansfield Park.

Clare Bucknell is a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and hosted the Close Readings series On Satire with Colin Burrow. The Treasuries, her social history of poetry anthologies, was published in 2023.

Thomas Jones is a senior editor at the LRB and host of the LRB Podcast. With Emily Wilson, he hosted the Close Readings series Among the Ancients.

The full list of texts for the series:

Mansfield Park (1814) by Jane Austen

Crotchet Castle (1831) by Thomas Love Peacock

Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë

Vanity Fair (1847) by William Makepeace Thackeray

North and South (1854) by Elizabeth Gaskell

Aurora Leigh (1856) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Anthony Trollope (TBD)

Mill on the Floss (1860) by George Eliot

Our Mutual Friend (1864) by Charles Dickens

Washington Square (1880)/Portrait of a Lady (1881) by Henry James

Kidnapped (1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson

The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) by Thomas Hardy

New Grub Street (1891) by George Gissing

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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.

The first episode will come out on Monday 20 January, on Milton's ‘Lycidas’.

Mark Ford is Professor of English at University College, London, and Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford.

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