In this book, leading writers and theorists from German history, including Marx, Simmel, Benjamin, and, above all, Heidegger, are unleashed on a range of Victorians with alarming results. The work begins with Tennyson being overshadowed by empire and homosocial tensions and ends with Conan Doyle writing about a bicycle belonging to a character called Heidegger. In between, author Roger Ebbatson makes bone-shaking progress across a Victorian terrain marked out by Thomas Hardy, Richard Jefferies, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Robert Louis Stevenson while considering topics that include shipwrecks,...

In this book, leading writers and theorists from German history, including Marx, Simmel, Benjamin, and, above all, Heidegger, are unleashed on a range of Victorians with alarming results. The work begins with Tennyson being overshadowed by empire and homosocial tensions and ends with Conan Doyle writing about a bicycle belonging to a character called Heidegger. In between, author Roger Ebbatson makes bone-shaking progress across a Victorian terrain marked out by Thomas Hardy, Richard Jefferies, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Robert Louis Stevenson while considering topics that include shipwrecks,...

Someone called Jacques Derrida, someone called him on the phone, someone who was dead this was August 22nd 1979. A mystery, he thought; but it is a mystery that began more than ten years earlier, in 1968, when Derrida, a philosopher, visits Oxford and there, before the very eyes of the Philosophy Sub-Faculty, he dies, several times. Murder, he thought. And so I shall investigate, and begin with a sign that the philosopher says he left within a book from the thirteenth century, a strange fortune-telling book that he had found in the oldest part of Oxford s Bodleian Library. In the book are a...

In this important study that begins with the claim that the fundamental idea governing the institution of the University is a will to freedom, author Thomas Docherty argues that the question of freedom lies at the heart of what is academic English at the beginning of the 21st century. Tracing a history of the modern European University from Vico onwards and including Hume, Rousseau, Schiller, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Newman, Alain, Benda, and Jaspers, the author argues the academy s will to freedom is grounded in study of the eloquence that has shaped literate and humane values. He goes on to...

Someone called Jacques Derrida, someone called him on the phone, someone who was dead this was August 22nd 1979. A mystery, he thought; but it is a mystery that began more than ten years earlier, in 1968, when Derrida, a philosopher, visits Oxford and there, before the very eyes of the Philosophy Sub-Faculty, he dies, several times. Murder, he thought. And so I shall investigate, and begin with a sign that the philosopher says he left within a book from the thirteenth century, a strange fortune-telling book that he had found in the oldest part of Oxford s Bodleian Library. In the book are a...

In this important study that begins with the claim that the fundamental idea governing the institution of the University is a will to freedom, author Thomas Docherty argues that the question of freedom lies at the heart of what is academic English at the beginning of the 21st century. Tracing a history of the modern European University from Vico onwards and including Hume, Rousseau, Schiller, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Newman, Alain, Benda, and Jaspers, the author argues the academy s will to freedom is grounded in study of the eloquence that has shaped literate and humane values. He goes on to...