Rather than taking his reader on another journey along the well-worn furrows and tangents of postmodern Kierkegaard scholarship, W. Glenn Kirkconnell seeks to present us with a fresh rehabilitation of Kierkegaard's early authorship, hoping to get closer to how these works would have appeared to the contemporaries of nineteenth-century Copenhagen. Since Kierkegaard has been read during the subsequent 150 years through the occasionally partisan lenses of atheism, Christianity, and post-structuralism, such an endeavour to return to the original appearance of the texts may appear destined to succumb to the difficulties of anachronism. However, Kirkconnell has succeeded in providing a significant overview of Kierkegaard's early authorship (from 1843's Either/Or to Philosophical Fragments), which not only elucidates some of the central features of Kierkegaard's religious and cultural milieu, but which presents a more coherent and less disparate understanding of Kierkegaard's thought than perhaps we have become accustomed to.

Without evading the various esoteric obscurities and hermeneutical tangles that threaten his attempts to refocus upon Kierkegaard's earlier writings with revived clarity, Kirkconnell accepts Kierkegaard's later retrospective claim to have been a religious author from beginning to end in order to test it. Following Kierkegaard's own suggestion, Kirkconnell employs the often under-examined more ‘direct’ religious ‘discourses’ as the hermeneutical key to the more celebrated and ‘indirect’ pseudonymous philosophical works. By allowing himself to be led by Kierkegaard's avowed network of ideas and themes, Kirkconnell has written a convincing and sensitive guide which successfully elucidates the transition and relation between the ethical and the religious in Kierkegaard's early writings.

Befitting a work of clarity and accessibility. Kirkconnell structures his book succinctly: it comprises a brief introduction, four standard chapters spanning the period of Kierkegaard's authorship under consideration, and finishes with a concise conclusion. In the ‘Introduction: for orientation’, Kirkconnell acknowledges some of the interpretive issues which have often occluded our frequently disparate readings of Kierkegaard's works: namely, the relation between the pseudonymous and non-pseudonymous writings; the frequently deceptive labyrinth of Kierkegaard's posthumous journals and papers; the tendency of interpreters to select personally agreeable passages at the expense of historical context. These well-known, if often under-acknowledged, foibles of Kierkegaard scholarship help to introduce Kirkconnell's central motivating principle: the simple yet profound notion that ‘no one reads Kierkegaard as he wrote’ (1).

How would Kierkegaard's works have appeared to the bewildered contemporaries who would have been the first to read Kierkegaard's earlier works and yet did not have recourse to the vast excavation of the posthumously published journals and papers; nor the subsequent writings in which Kierkegaard strove to render his identity in more explicit, if occasionally agonisingly visceral, detail; not to mention the subsequent decades of secondary scholarship, (mis)interpretation, obscuration, and renaissance? In order to engage effectively with this question, the appearance of these works must become the operative term. In parallel to his more esoteric pseudonymous works (Either/Or; Repetition; Fear and Trembling; Philosophical Fragments) Kierkegaard published, under his own name, a series of more accessibly religious ‘upbuilding discourses’ (available to us now in the collection Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, though originally published in smaller sets parallel to the pseudonymous works). ‘When we read them as they were intended to be read’, Kirkconnell claims, ‘we see themes highlighted that were only obscurely presented by the pseudonyms alone, or notice comments in the discourses that echo more extensive pseudonymous discussions’ (2). By reading these works in dialogue and on their own terms, Kirkconnell seeks to elicit an inter-textual conversation that may attest to an underlying unity within Kierkegaard's earlier works: a unity whose various facets have perhaps been obscured by the toils of subsequent research.

Chapter 2, ‘Either/Or and the Two Upbuilding Discourses of 1843’ initiates the main body of the book: an outline and exploration of specific texts by Kierkegaard with particular reference to historical context and unity of authorship. Kirkconnell here introduces his crucial reading of the pseudonymous Either/Or ‘as a religious polemic’: ‘a reductio ad absurdum of the amoral spirituality of the poet’ that also pushes ‘the ethical religiousness (the “religion within the limits of reason”) to the breaking point, until it becomes clear that there are in fact serious limits for both the ethical and the religious in this approach’ (3–4). This reading effectively sets the tone for Kirkconnell's work by suggesting an overarching transition towards the genuinely religious and opening greater space for an informative dialogue with Kierkegaard's upbuilding works. Exploring the ‘vast differences between nineteenth-century Danish Christendom and twentieth-century Western secularism’, Kirkconnell seeks to rehabilitate the function of Kierkegaard's Either/Or as ‘religious satire’ (11) directed towards the contemporary debates and figures in the cultural-religious discourse that raged at the time. ‘In sum’, Kirkconnell concludes, ‘the bulk of Either/Or traces the breakdown of the aesthetic life in despair, and the redemption from despair through the ethical. It then continues to follow the ethical through the appearance of guilt-consciousness, which opens the door to a new, more personal relationship to God’ (33).

In order to further elucidate the texture of this progressive religious sphere, Kirkconnell then turns to the non-pseudonymous Two Upbuilding Discourses that accompanied the more cryptic Either/Or of 1843. Such an approach may seem to proceed naturally: leading us from the ostensibly negative ‘neither/nor’ of the aesthetic and the ethical to a more pronounced expression of the emerging personal relationship to God. However, Kirkconnell willingly concedes that the two short discourses do not actually provide a direct or extensive commentary, correlation, echo, or reflection of the key debate between the aesthetic and the ethical which dominates Either/Or. Instead of direct response, Kirkconnell discerns more of a parallel of ‘general themes’ (34) between the discourses and Either/Or.

In chapter 3, ‘The writings of October 16, 1843 and emergence of the religious’, Kirkconnell proceeds to a consideration of the pseudonymous works Repetition and Fear and Trembling – each of which ‘picks up on themes raised in Either/Or and responds to them in ways that are essential in understanding the relationship between the ethical and the religious’ (38) – and the accompanying non-pseudonymous collection of Three Upbuilding Discourses, all published on 16 October 1843. Chapter 3 traces the development of common themes from Either/Or through Repetition (which is here regarded as the bridging work) and Fear and Trembling, pursuing the interrelation of these works and resisting the temptation to weave unity from these ostensibly self-referencing works through the loose threads of Kierkegaard's psycho-biography.

Kirkconnell is, as ever, clear and precise in his overviews of these works, allowing them to speak for themselves and with one another as the material appears to suggest. The dark rhetoric of Søren Kierkegaard's forsaken love and enciphered allusions to his father's melancholy find no place here: sacrificed to the objective of receiving these works, as far as possible, as they may have to readers at the time. In this respect, Kirkconnell discerns a transition from the more comforting religiosity of the previous Two Upbuilding Discourses to the starker ‘religion of paradox, trial, absurdity’ in the Three Upbuilding Discourses of October 1843: a vision of the religious life ‘consonant with the themes raised in Fear and Trembling and Repetition’ (71). Following on from the previous works, ‘all three books deal with the relationship between the ethical and the religious’, though now more explicitly and specifically through the more problematic lens of ‘guilt, sin, and redemption’ (75).

Chapter 4, ‘The nine discourse bridge’, is concerned with the period of Kierkegaard's authorship between 16 October 1843 and the publication of Philosophical Fragments (under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus) on 13 June 1844. During this brief hiatus in the pseudonymous writings, Kierkegaard published nine more upbuilding discourses – regarded by Kirkconnell as a bridge between the earlier pseudonymous works and more consummate pseudonym of Johannes Climacus. Kirkconnell is discerning and appropriately restrained in drawing out connections and common themes between these works, but perhaps the most illuminating section in this chapter concerns ‘The influence of Luther and Hamann: two kingdoms to three spheres’. Kirkconnell rightly acknowledges that ‘the upbuilding discourses show far more clearly the theological context for Kierkegaard's thought, and the nature and extent of his use of Luther’ (86). As Kirkconnell elucidates, the eighteenth-century philosopher Johann G. Hamann played an important role in mediating to Kierkegaard Luther's notion of the ‘two kingdoms’. Exploring this under-examined relation, Kirkconnell infers a compelling parallel between Luther's two kingdoms and Kierkegaard's own three spheres of aesthetic, ethical, and religious existence.

The fifth chapter on ‘The Philosophical Fragments and the religion of paradox: sin and redemption’ proceeds to the emergence of Kierkegaard's most consummate pseudonym up to this point in the authorship, Johannes Climacus: a pseudonym that ‘Kierkegaard publicly owns and with which he associates his name in a way he has not done with earlier pseudonyms’. As such, Kirkconnell examines how the Climacean writings ‘appear to stylistically link the two sides of Kierkegaard's authorship, and presumably will link their interest as well’ (107). This final full chapter is oriented around a specific consideration of 1844's Philosophical Fragments: regarded by Kirkconnell as ‘the first of the pseudonymous works to deal with such specifically Christian themes as atonement or the divinity’, and, in more explicitly religious rather than predominantly ethical terms, sin (108).

Kirkconnell provides a succinct yet detailed exegesis of this pivotal work, outlining the progression from the Socratic religion of immanence to the wholly other transcendence of the paradox of the Incarnation. Whereas the pseudonymous works up to this point have arrived at ‘the concept of “sin” as both the necessary completion of ethics and its refutation’, Kirkconnell argues, ‘[t]he direct discourses arrive at ‘sin’ largely through an exercise in humility, as the necessary recognition by the religious person of his or her own limits' (108). Ultimately, both approaches converge in the suggestion ‘that some sort of drastic divine action is needed if sin is to be overcome, which can restore the broken God-relationship, integrate the guilty one back into the moral order, and the repair the self-contradictions and hobbling compulsions of the universal (fallen) human condition’ (108). Into this bleak arena steps Johannes Climacus and his attempt in a modestly entitled Philosophical Fragments to confront the paradox of a direct and s relation to the divine.

Ultimately, Kirkconnell persuasively presents Philosophical Fragments as an exposé of the Speculative or pseudo-Hegelian apologists who would render Christianity intelligible, or reasonable, by rendering the central paradox of the Incarnation as philosophically reasonable or historically understandable – or those who render ‘sin’ in less radical, but more palatable terms than ‘true Christianity’ requires. As such, in Philosophical Fragments, Kirkconnell astutely concludes that ‘Kierkegaard is not primarily engaged in apologetics … but in polemics against the most common apologetics of his day’ (138). Therefore, as Kirkconnell concludes,

Kirkconnell thus reads Kierkegaard's authorship up to this point as arriving, through irony and negation as well as direct religious discourse, at a reconciliation of the ethical and the religious radically manifest in the paradox of Christianity. In the brief chapter 6, ‘Conclusion’, Kirkconnell reminds us of Kierkegaard's contentious claim in his posthumously published Point of View for my Work as an Author that he was, from the very beginning, a religious author. Now, at the conclusion to his own book, Kirkconnell suggests that ‘we can, experimentally at least, imagine a hypothetical reader looking at Kierkegaard's authorship as it was originally presented: chronologically arranged, with pseudonyms and discourses interspersed’ (147). While no book can ever comprehensively succeed in transporting the reader directly into the contemporary milieu of Kierkegaard's original audience, Kirkconnell's work makes an important contribution in this direction. Briefly summarizing the conclusions of his previous five chapters, Kirkconnell traces a compelling development of Kierkegaard's authorship clearly elucidating such emerging threads as the problem of sin and the nature of faith. Presented in this light, Kierkegaard's works emerge in a more coherent and less fragmentary focus. What is more, Kirkconnell contends, certain readings appear more or less convincing than before. For example, those who read Climacus as an advocate of an implicitly atheistic blind ‘leap of faith’ appear less persuasive when Philosophical Fragments is not read in discontinuity and isolation: ‘clearly a reading of Climacus that flows from the text and which situates the work within the wider authorship is preferable’ (151).

Such a reading is evidently preferable and Kirkconnell has done an admirable job – always informative, incisive, yet with a suitably light touch when needed. However, the contextual question threatens to devour itself. For example, given that these early works are more intelligible in the light of one another, Kirkconnell does not give a sufficient account of why he has chosen to conclude his contextual reading of Kierkegaard with 1844's Philosophical Fragments. Before being superseded by his ‘higher’ namesake ‘Anti-Climacus’ (a pseudonym even more intimate to Kierkegaard's own perspective), pseudonym Johannes Climacus proceeded to publish the ‘sequel’, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, in 1846: a period regarded by Kierkegaard himself as marking a decisive break in his authorship. This may well make for a more satisfying overview for a periodic overview of Kierkegaard's works; but it would also have admittedly demanded that Kirkconnell include several more works than space may allow. Perhaps a sequel beckons.

The question which Kirkconnell poses concerning how Kierkegaard's writings would have appeared to his contemporaries continues to evade a comprehensive answer. But from an historical or hermeneutical perspective, such a question must remain essentially unanswerable. And yet this question has provided the motivation for a reading which brings the reader closer to this experience than many more elaborate or directed interpretations have done. In one respect, this is rudimentary Kierkegaard, suitable for students in need of a clear and sharply written entry-point to one of modern philosophy and theology's more enigmatic figures: an interpretive introduction to the earlier authorship which outlines the central arguments, cross-pollination, and historical context of the works without becoming enmeshed in the darker recesses of psycho-biography or the sprawling tributaries of secondary scholarship. However, the brute fact that these latter factors have inevitably come to, in some respects, suffocate such an immediate engagement with Kierkegaard suggests that this book is for even the most seasoned of Kierkegaard scholars. The omission of sustained engagement with secondary scholarship (evidenced, for example, by the rather sparse bibliography presented) proves to be ostensible weakness that from another perspective actually highlights the strength of the book. Jaded, unsure, over-confident, or simply confused, we can all benefit from an attempt to return to the less convoluted reception of this mystifying figure as he emerged during such an anxious moment in the history of Western Christendom.