Literature, Philosophy, Nihilism The Uncanniest of Guests

This book charts the history of the concept of nihilism in some of the most important philosophers and literary theorists of the modern and postmodern periods, including Wyndham Lewis, Heidegger, Adorno, Blanchot, Derrida, and Vattimo. Focusing in particular on the ways in which each of these thinkers produces a theory of the literary as the privileged form of resistance to nihilism, Weller offers the first in-depth analysis of nihilism's key role in the thinking of the aesthetic since Nietzsche.

SHANE WELLER is Reader in Comparative Literature in the School of European Culture and Languages at the University of Kent, UK. His publications include A Taste for the Negative: Beckett and Nihilism (2005), Beckett, Literature and the Ethics of Alterity (2006) and The Flesh in the Text (2007, co-edited with Thomas Baldwin and James Fowler).