In the 1990s, it was the French theorists such as Derrida, Lacan and Foucault who, with their stress on linguistic play and undecidability, took Victorian Studies by storm; now, it seems, it is the Germans who are coming. In Roger Ebbatson's new book, Marx, Simmel, Benjamin and, above all, Heidegger are unleashed on a range of Victorian texts - some unsuspecting, some all too suspecting. 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; 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 nineteenth century is a terrible awareness of the darkest moments of the darkest moments of the twentieth century. 172pp. N.B. Slight fading to rear board. Inside of D/J stained.
Sussex Academic Press, 2006, Cloth, Book Condition: Fine, Jacket Condition: Very Good. First Edition. . 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall.

ISBN: 1845191048

Inventory #23886

Price: £ 25.00 GBP ($ 34.25 approx. - € 28.25 approx.)

N.B. Head of D/J spine chipped with some loss. Marks to rear D/J. 273pp.
Macmillan & Co Ltd, 1949, Cloth, Book Condition: Very Good, Jacket Condition: Good. First Edition. . 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall.

ISBN:

Inventory #29052

Price: £ 7.50 GBP ($ 10.28 approx. - € 8.48 approx.)

This book examines literary modernism in its relation to the history of criticism by analysing the role of Aristotelian principles, primarily the notion of formal affectivism, in the critical writings of these three modernists who have invariably been thought to uphold incompatible aesthetic beliefs: where as Eliot saw himself as a classicist modernist, Stevens and Woolf shared a marked anti-classicist stance. Despite their initially incompatible attitudes to literary history and criticism, this study discloses their convergence on the Aristotelian notion of formal affectivism, demonstrated through specific conceptual shifts. The main feature of the book is its originality of approach, which seeks a 'diachronic' solution to a 'synchronic' problem - the debate about the Modern, reflected in the claims and counter claims made by the modernists themselves and by subsequent literary critics and theorists. This methodology was largely dictated by the nature of the subject: the adversarial critical orientation of three modernists, who have never been studied as a group before, and the attempt to reconcile their differences by reconfiguring them in terms of the Aristotelian critical tradition. The author demonstrates conclusively how Eliot incorporated central Aristotelian dramatic principles into his view of literary history and criticism, and, similarly, how both Stevens and Woolf, through historically determined conceptual shifts, endorse and use formal affectivism and dramatic criteria, which, as may be expected, they almost never refer back to Aristotle or to his foremost modernist defender, Eliot. 152pp.
Sussex Academic Press, 2008, Cloth, Book Condition: New, Jacket Condition: No d/j as Published. First Edition. . 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall.

ISBN: 9781845191719

Inventory #21749

Price: £ 35.00 GBP ($ 47.95 approx. - € 39.55 approx.)

Hamish Hamilton, 1996, Cloth, Book Condition: Very Good, Jacket Condition: Very Good. First Edition. . 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall.

ISBN: 024113482X

Inventory #19206

Price: £ 7.50 GBP ($ 10.28 approx. - € 8.48 approx.)

Previous owner's signature on ffep.207pp.
Severn House, 1980, Cloth, Book Condition: Very Good, Jacket Condition: Very Good. First Hardback Edition. . 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall.

ISBN: 0727806041

Inventory #20475

Price: £ 15.00 GBP ($ 20.55 approx. - € 16.95 approx.)