Landscapes of Eternal Return
Tennyson to Hardy
Roger Ebbatson
This book is about the resonance and implications of the idea of ‘eternal return’, as expounded notably by Nietzsche, in relation to a range of nineteenth-century texts, both poetry and prose. It opens up the issue of repetition and cyclical time as a key feature of literary texts in the Victorian period, with the emphasis falling especially upon the resonance of landscape representation as a vehicle of meaning and upon the philosophical and aesthetic implications of the doctrine of ‘recurrence’ for the authors studied here, ranging from Tennyson and Arthur Hallam to Swinburne and Hardy. The study aims to shed a radically new light on a number of symptomatic nineteenth-century texts.
Roger Ebbatson is currently Hon. Visiting Professor at Lancaster University, UK, having previously taught at the University of Sokoto, Nigeria, the University of Worcester, and Loughborough University. He is a Fellow of the English Association, and a Vice-President of the Tennyson Society. His publications include Lawrence and the Nature Tradition (1980), Hardy: The Margin of the Unexpressed (1994), An Imaginary England (2005), Heidegger’s Bicycle (2006), and Landscape & Literature, 1830-1914 (2013).
Order online at https://www.palgrave.com.