Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Lovell Beddoes

Dr Ute Berns is a Research Fellow at the Free University of Berlin, Germany. Professor Michael Bradshaw is Head of English and History at Edgehill U niversity, UK. Co-editor of Beddoes's Selected Poetry and has also published on John Keats and Mary Shelley.

'A cutting-edge collection of highly perceptive and original essays by an impressive team of leading experts and innovative academic young bloods. A signpost to Beddoes research, this volume indicates an overdue re-evaluation of the man and his fascinating oeuvre. Strongly recommended.' Christoph Bode, Munich University 'The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Lovell Beddoes convenes a valuable collection of critical perspectives and resources for research, magnetized by the gorgeous intensities of this morbidly enchanting writer. With a comprehensive introduction and a detailed bibliography, editors Ute Berns and Michael Bradshaw advance the resurgence of interest in this experimenter in literary form, worker of exceptional imagination, and vivid register of the phantasmagoria of historical tumult and crisis. The precocious Brides' Tragedy and the obsessive Death's Jest-Book command the fullest attention; we are invited as well to consider Beddoes' arresting, haunting lyrics, the conflicts of his homosexual passions, his adventures in science, and his contentious revolutionary activism. Working productively across boundaries of genre, gender, nation, period, and discipline (and, in consequence, the whole terrain of existential selfhood), this company of critics and scholars proves a most worthy companion to the extraordinary Mr. Beddoes.' Susan J. Wolfson, Princeton University, USA ’No volume before it has more illuminatingly at once explored and exemplified the state of Beddoes studies.’ European Romantic Review

• Contents: General editors' preface; Prologue: 'prince of morticians': authors on Beddoes; Introduction, Ute Berns and Michael Bradshaw. Part I: 'The latch-string of a new world's wicket': poetry and agency in Death's Jest Book; or, The Fool's Tragedy, Michael O'Neil; 'Death and his sweetheart': revolution and return in Death's Jest Book, David M. Baulch; The Jest Book, the body and the state, Michael Bradshaw; 'Liberty['s] smile melts tyrants down in time': T.L. Beddoes's Death's Jest Book and German revolutionary discourse in Heine, Börne, and Büchner, Raphael Hörmann; Death's Jest Book and the pathological imagination, Frederick Burwick; Between the 'hostile body' and 'hieroglyphic human soul': the ethics of Beddoes's 'mental theatre', Nat Leach; Performing genres in Death's Jest Book: tragedy as harlequinade, Ute Berns; Beddoes and the Theatre of Cruelty: or, the problem of Isbrand's sister: some thoughts arising while re-editing Death's Jest Book, Alan Halsey. Part II: Thomas Lovell Beddoes and the vampires of history: reading the poet's German prose, Andrew James Johnston; Three of Thomas Lovell Beddoes's dramatic fragments: fractured techno-gothic appendages and Thomas Beddoes's Hygëia, Marjean D. Purinton; The Bride's Tragedy and the myth of Cupid and Psyche, Shelley Rees; Dying with a vengeance: dead brides and the death-fetish in T.L. Beddoes, Diane Long Hoeveler; T.L. Beddoes's terminable or interminable end, Christopher Moylan; Epilogue: Death's Jest Book on stage in 2003, recollections by Jerome McGann and Frederick Burwick; General bibliography; Index.