Science, politics, and friendship in the works of Thomas Lowell Beddoes / Ute Berns.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Berns, Ute.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Beddoes, Thomas Lovell, 1803-1849--Criticism and interpretation.

Beddoes, Thomas Lovell.

Beddoes, Thomas Lovell, 1803-1849.

Criticism and interpretation.

Physical Description:

xxvii, 353 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Newark : University of Delaware Press ; Lanham, Md. : Rowman & Littlefield, [2012]

Summary:

This study reevaluates 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 to Ezra Pound to John Ashbery, scholars have frequently neglected it due to its purportedly morbid and opaque eccentricity. Countering this scholarly perception, Science, Politics, and Friendship in the Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes deftly relocates Beddoes's poetry, drama, and prose to the center of Anglo-German debates on aesthetics and life science, politics, and theater in an early nineteenth-century European context. Aided by his letters from Germany, this 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 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' organizations; and from Byron, Baillie, and London's illegitimate theater to Schiller's and Tieck's highly charged reflections on male-male friendship. This study combines historicist strategies with theories of performance, performativity, and visuality as it focuses, in particular, on Beddoes's major and defining work, Daub'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 Btichner, Grabbe, and a European theater avant-garde. This innovative study of Beddoes's work, cutting across current investigation 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 theater as well as Queer studies. Book jacket.

Contents:

The Critical Significance of Death's Jest-Book

Part 1 Discursive and Tropological Preliminaries

Chapter 1 Discursive Horizons in Beddoes's Letters 3

An Early Poetic Vision of Death's Jest-Book Immortality, or the Ubiquity of History Medicine-History-Biography

Chapter 2 Visual Figuration and Performativity in Death's Jest-Book 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"

Part 2 The Politics of Revolutionary Bonapartism

Chapter 3 The Republican Promise of Revolutionary Bonapartism 67

Napoleonic Legacies-Anglo-German Contexts Bonapartist Leadership and the Insurrectionary Brotherhood

Fashioning Rebellion as "History"

"The Median Supper": A Source of Epic Tensions

Chapter 4 Roman Ideals in "Unroman Times" 99

The Model of Rome

Roman Heroism and Nostalgia

Caesarism and the Crime of "Modern Treason"

A Medievalized Prince and a Neo-Elizabethan Plotter

Chapter 5 Caesarist Visions of History 127

Comparative Anatomy and History

Caesarism and Romantic Discourse

Caesarism, Conspiracy, and Collusion

The Politics of the Aesthetic: Performative

Force as Radical Practice

Part 3 The Radical Politics of Friendship

Chapter 6 Friendship and Fraternity in Crisis 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

Chapter 7 Friendship(-) Haunting Sovereignty 187

Mourning and Denial in the Resurrection Scene

Shakespearean Spectres: Self, Sovereignty, and the Ghost of the Friend

Invisible Perils

Chapter 8 Resignifying the Friend 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

Part 4 History and the Sciences of Life

Chapter 9 The Discourse of "Life" in "Squats on a Toad-Stool" 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

Chapter 10 Life Science, Natural History, and Politics in Death's Jest-Book 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

Part 5 Toward a New Theater

Chapter 11 Performing Genres and the Uses of Illegitimacy 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.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781611493672

1611493676

9781611493689

1611493684

OCLC:

742512343