Henry Staten is Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at the University of Washington. Although he was originally trained as a Victorianist, his acclaimed first book, Wittgenstein and Derrida, was one of the first philosophical commentaries on deconstruction. Since then his work has ranged widely across literature and philosophy from the Greeks through modernism. In 1998 he received the for an outstanding essay in PMLA.

• Author’s Preface; Series Editor’s Preface; Introduction; I: Victorian Physio-Psychology and Nietzsche; II: Critical Moral Psychology in the Novels; 1. The Poisoned Gift of Forgiveness in Jane Eyre; 2. Subincision of the Ethical Subject (Middlemarch); 3. What Things Cost in Middlemarch; 4. The Return to the Heath (Wuthering Heights); 5. Spirit Becomes Matter; Index.

This wonderfully illuminating book presents the best, most detailed, readings I know of Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, and Wuthering Heights. Basing his approach on a brilliant reading of Nietzsche’s 'physio-psychology' in its intellectual context, Staten shows, against critical tradition, that these novels dramatize the new materialist biological morality of life energy.