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.

This short chapter discusses the impact of lab-grown diamonds on the traditional diamond industry and the value of a diamond and uses it as an allegory for AI’s potential impact on intellectual property. Additionally, the chapter touches upon consumer preferences and the growing trend towards alternative gemstones, as well as the implications for the future of the diamond industry, again drawing parallels to the IP system.

Chapter IV discusses another important feature of Tolkien’s work, that is, the vast amount of narrative parallelism, both intra- and intertextual, focusing on some case studies (including the relation between the hero Beren and the hobbit Frodo in particular). These parallels are related to Tolkien’s belief in “the seamless web of story”, that is to say, to the view that there is only one single Tree of Tales, criss-crossing primary and secondary realities, which sprouts again and again with new branches and leaves, all different and yet all similar. This ‘organic’ image is helpful to understand key aspects of Tolkien’s literary ‘theory’, including his famous aversion to allegory, which is here related to his belief that literature embodies in new “modes” the same universal “motives” but in a way that is ‘unexpected’ and ‘unconscious’, and the conviction that all stories correlate with each other in a narrative chain having its centre in the Gospel Story.