This chapter considers how the nonsense of Lear, Carroll and Rossetti charts a course through the unknown territories of late-Victorian modernity. It explores the flourishing of nonsense in the 1870s in the context of accounts of the decade as a time when Victorian culture was forced to reckon with the changes and developments that the century had been driving towards. Focusing on puzzling geographies of Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark and Through the Looking-Glass, the playful exploration of new ways of knowing in Lear’s poetry and the interrogation of likeness and difference in Christina Rossetti’s works for children, it proposes nonsense as a genre well-placed to express the period’s political and epistemological uncertainties.

The language of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poetry is notable for its imagistic intensity, for its intricate sonic patterning, and sometimes for its cryptic ambiguity. This chapter surveys several nineteenth-century contexts for Hopkins’s idiosyncratic diction. His interest in philology underlies his imitation of alliterative Anglo-Saxon verse and of the medieval Welsh system of versification known as cynghanedd, which involves complex structures of internal rhyme and consonant repetition. Additionally, like his contemporaries William Barnes and Thomas Hardy, Hopkins draws on regional dialect to capture the essences of certain landscapes, creatures, individuals, and trades. And given his predilection for neologizing and at times for elevating sonic gorgeousness over communicative clarity, he may also be read alongside Victorian nonsense writers such as Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. Ironically, Hopkins’s interest in the deep roots of English drives his radical linguistic innovation – and his obscure vocabulary can allow him to channel modes of divinely inspired expression.

This Introduction provides summaries of the chapters of the book and briefly discusses some of the main obstacles we encounter when we attempt to engage with Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.

Chapter 4 explores Kant’s theory of genius. The chapter avoids the well-discussed question about whether or why Kant denied that scientific activity requires or displays genius. It instead asks whether, in Kant’s view, genius can produce original nonsense. Is taste a component of genius, or does taste impose constraints on genius as if from the outside? The chapter maintains that Kant takes up two distinct conceptions of genius, the thin and the thick. Both conceptions can be found in Kant’s early thoughts about genius. When the two notions are retained in the third Critique, it creates internal tensions.

This chapter examines Heidegger’s use of seemingly nonsensical sentences in his 1926 Logic lectures to illustrate the primacy of a kind of practical sense, which serves as a basis for a derivative logical-propositional sense. It contrasts Heidegger’s approach with a conception of nonsense emerging out of an “austere” reading of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, according to which nonsense is never a function of what words mean but only a result of a failure to assign a meaning to one or more elements of a would-be proposition; according to this austere reading, there are thus no nonsensical propositions, but only strings of meaningless signs. Although Heidegger in certain respects hews to this austere conception, viz. in recognizing the interplay between bipolarity and something’s being a proposition at all, his use of nonsense nonetheless departs from the specifics of the austere reading. Doing so, the chapter argues, allows Heidegger to do a kind of phenomenological-ontological work, whose possibility the austere reading renders obscure (at best).

Chapter 10 begins with an overview of previous, mostly telic treatments of play, contrasted with a “for its own sake,” paratelic approach.It discusses juvenile play, then adult play, including the play of animals in the wild.Much of the chapter focuses on language play, and on the function of play in conversation.The discussion throughout emphasizes the intrinsic motivation for play while acknowledging its contributions to individual and group homeostasis.

Ludwig Wittgenstein has a recognizable approach that he regularly pursues in his philosophical investigations. There is a problem that he often presses, a form of criticism that he often develops, against traditional pursuits of philosophy. It is surprisingly difficult to say clearly what this problem is. But it is worthwhile to try, for this criticism is not only a hallmark of his thought but is also closely connected to other central features of it, for instance, to his conceptions of language and of the nature of philosophical investigation. These features can be properly understood only in concert with a correct view of his terms of criticism of traditional philosophy. In this essay, Alexander George articulates a problem Wittgenstein sees with philosophy, shows how it illuminates otherwise peculiar features of Wittgenstein’s investigations, and finally considers an interesting situation in which Wittgenstein’s goals might be thwarted.