The 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.

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.