Science, Politics, and Friendship in the Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes

Byron, Baillie and London's illegitimate theatre to Schiller's and Tieck's highly charged reflections on male-male friendship. The study combines historicist strategies with theories of performance, performativity, and visuality as it focuses, in particular, on Beddoes's major and defining work, Death's Jest-Book, first completed in 1829 and published posthumously after much revision in 1850. This study shows how Death's Jest Book, as both drama and poetry, devises complex perspectives on scientifically inspired notions of 'life' and history, how it forges a radical vision for post-Napoleonic Europe and how it links this vision to a daring conception of desiring, gendered selves. The book pays close attention to the dialogue Beddoes's writing maintains with Early Modern literature, and it highlights the proto-modernist features that link his work to that of Büchner, Grabbe and a European theatre avant-garde. This innovative study of Beddoes's work, cutting across current investigations into politics, gender,

and science in intercultural Romantic Studies should be of interest to scholars and students of British Romantic and Victorian studies as well as of German Vormärz studies, and to students and scholars of drama and theatre as well as Queer studies. [Publisher's text]