Liverpool University Press Heideggers Bicycle: Interfering with Victorian Texts (Critical Inventions)

Product Description In Roger Ebbatson's new book, Marx, Simmel, Benjamin and, above all, Heidegger are unleashed on a range of Victorian texts, and the results are alarming. Ebbatson begins with Tennyson, overshadowed by empire and homosocial tensions, and ends with Conan Doyle writing about a bicycle belonging to a character called Heidegger. In between, he makes bone-shaking progress over a Victorian terrain marked out by Thomas Hardy, Richard Jefferies, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Robert Louis Stevenson. And along the way, Ebbatson considers shipwrecks, money, nature, the South Seas Mission, and 'final solutions'. Tennyson, we discover, was afraid of his own shadow, Hopkins's greatest poem was created by erratic compasses, Hardy wrote like Kafka, Stevenson was drawn to murderous missionaries, and Conan Doyle applauded the concentration camp. Ebbatson shows us that what the Germans bring to our understanding of the 19th century is a terrible awareness of the darkest moments of the 20th century. Review "In this startling new book Roger Ebbatson adopts the unusual strategy of recycling Victorian writing through the bone-crunching machine of Germanic thought. The results are dramatic, as it quickly becomes clear that Nietzsche is not the only German to "philosophise with a hammer;" it turns out that to reread Victorian literature via Germanic thought is to take a hammer to that literature, to do a kind of a violence to it." --John Schad, series editor, Critical Inventions "The reader is likely to be rewarded by Ebbatson's close attention to textual detail and by his innovative and thought-provoking approach to the analysis of 19th-century literature." --Modern Language Review About the Author Roger Ebbatson is a visiting professor at Lancaster University. He is the author of several books, including The Evolutionary Self, Landscape and Literature 1830-1914, and Tennyson.