Heidegger's Bicycle: Interfering with Victorian Texts

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 alon…