About the Author

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.

Reviews

Spirit Becomes Matter is a brilliantly innovative book. It will henceforth be required reading for those interested in these three novels, in Victorian novels generally, and in Victorian intellectual history.--J. Hillis Miller "Modern Language Quarterly: A Journal of Literary History"

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.--J. Hillis Miller, University of California, Irvine