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

by Berns, Ute

• ISBN13: 9781611493672
• ISBN10: 1611493676
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-11-17
• Publisher: University of Delaware Press

Summary

This study revaluates the work of the scientist and radical, poet and dramatist and English exile in Germany Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803-1849). While his writing has elicited high praise from poets ranging from Robert Browning through Ezra Pound to John Ashbery, scholars have frequently neglected it on grounds of its purportedly morbid and opaque eccentricity. Countering this scholarly perception, this book deftly relocates Beddoes's poetry, drama and prose at the centre of Anglo-German debates on aesthetics and life science, politics and theatre in an early nineteenth-century European context. Aided by his letters from Germany, the book re-creates the intercultural discursive universe in which Beddoes easily moves from Shakespeare's plays or the aesthetic experiments of Shelley and his circle to Goethe and to topics debated among Heinrich Heine and the Jungdeutschen, from the most advanced contemporary scientific research to the post-Napoleonic politics of the German radical students' organisations, and from 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 investigati

Author Biography

Ute Berns is professor of English literature at the University of Hamburg.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Introduction Thomas Lovell Beddocs: Critical Perspectives	p. xi
The Critical Significance of Death's Jest-Book
Discursive and Tropological Preliminaries
Discursive Horizons in Beddoes's Letters	p. 3
An Early Poetic Vision of Death's Jest-Book Immortality, or the Ubiquity of History Medicine-History-Biography
Visual Figuration and Performativity in Death's Jest-Book	p. 31
Death's Jest-Book: Drama or Poetry? Plots, Triangles, and Medievalism Principal Tropes (I): "Death's Jest-Book" Principal Tropes (II): "Triumph of Death" and "Dance of Death"
The Politics of Revolutionary Bonapartism
The Republican Promise of Revolutionary Bonapartism	p. 67
Napoleonic Legacies-Anglo-German Contexts Bonapartist Leadership and the Insurrectionary Brotherhood
Fashioning Rebellion as "History"
"The Median Supper": A Source of Epic Tensions
Roman Ideals in "Unroman Times"	p. 99
The Model of Rome
Roman Heroism and Nostalgia
Caesarism and the Crime of "Modern Treason"
A Medievalized Prince and a Neo-Elizabethan Plotter
Caesarist Visions of History	p. 127
Comparative Anatomy and History
Caesarism and Romantic Discourse
Caesarism, Conspiracy, and Collusion
The Politics of the Aesthetic: Performative
Force as Radical Practice
The Radical Politics of Friendship
Friendship and Fraternity in Crisis	p. 155
The Discourse of Friendship-Classical Heritage and Anglo-German Contexts
Schiller's "Philosophische Briefe": Beddoes's
Translation of Friendship
Binding Oaths and Failing Triangles
Engendering the Sublime Figure of a Virile
Homosexuality
Friendship(-) Haunting Sovereignty	p. 187
Mourning and Denial in the Resurrection Scene
Shakespearean Spectres: Self, Sovereignty, and the Ghost of the Friend
Invisible Perils
Resignifying the Friend	p. 213
Shaping "Thin Air": Invisibility and Romantic Discourse
The Political Ambivalence of Friendship
The Politics of Dramatic Form in Death's Jest-Book and Sardanapalus
History and the Sciences of Life
The Discourse of "Life" in "Squats on a Toad-Stool"	p. 237
German Naturphilosophie, Blumenbach, and the Concept of the Biltlungstrieb
Scientfic Visions and their Poetic Negotiation
Beddoes's "Squats on a Toad-Stool" and Goethe's
"Metamorphose der Tiere"
Scientific Figurations of the Social and the Literary
Life Science, Natural History, and Politics in Death's Jest-Book	p. 269
The History of the Earth and the Structure of Death's Jest-Book
The History of the Earth as a Book of Animal Fables
A Lecture-Sermon about Life, Death, and the History of the Earth
Toward a New Theater
Performing Genres and the Uses of Illegitimacy	p. 301
Contemporary Theater and the Significance of Genre Harlequinade and Bonapartism's Plebeian Features Masque, Antimasque, and the Dance of Death
"Old Ghosts" and the European Avant-Garde
Bibliography	p. 321
Index	p. 341
About the Author	p. 353
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