Bringing together eminent scholars and emerging critics who offer a range of perspectives and critical methods, this collection sets a new standard in Beddoes criticism. In line with the goals of Ashgate's Research Companion series, the editors and contributors provide an overview of Beddoes's criticism and identify significant new directions in Beddoes studies. These include exploring Beddoes's German context, only recently a site of critical attention; reading Beddoes's plays in light of gender theory; and reassessing Beddoes's use of dramatic genre in the context of recent work by theatre historians. Rounding out the volume are essays devoted to key areas in Beddoes's scholarship such as nineteenth-century medical theories, psychoanalytic myth, and Romantic ventriloquism. This collection makes the case for Beddoes's centrality to contemporary debates about nineteenth-century literary culture and its contexts and his influence on Modernist conceptions of literature.
'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
