This book is Thomas Lovell Beddoes's defining text, a pastiche Renaissance tragedy replete with treachery, murder, sorcery and haunting, the extravagant expression of the poet's lifelong obsession with mortality and immortality. It is a classic of the literature of death.

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.

Gothic verse liberated the dark side of Romantic and Victorian verse: its medievalism, melancholy and morbidity. Some poets intended merely to shock or entertain, but Gothic also liberated the creative imagination and inspired them to enter disturbing areas of the psyche and to portray extreme states of human consciousness. This anthology illustrates that journey. This is the first modern anthology of Gothic verse. It traces the rise of Gothic in the late eighteenth century and follows its footsteps through the nineteenth century. Gothic has never truly died as it constantly reinvents itself, and this lively, illustrated and annotated anthology offers students the atmospheric poetry that originally studded terror novels and inspired horror films. Alongside canonical verse by Coleridge, Keats and Poe, it introduces readers to lesser-known authors excursions into the macabre and the grotesque. A wide range of poetic forms is included: as well as ballads, tales, lyrics, meditative odes and dramatic monologues, a medievalist romance by Scott and Gothic drama by Byron are also included in full. A substantial introduction by Caroline Franklin puts the rise of Gothic poetry into its historical context, relating it both to Romanticism and Enlightenment historicism. Although Gothic fiction has now been receiving serious critical attention for twenty years, Gothic verse has been largely overlooked. It is therefore hoped that this anthology will stimulate scholarly interest as well as readers pleasure in these unearthly poems.

The Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature is an authoritative three-volume reference work that covers British artistic, literary, and intellectual movements between 1780 and 1830, within the context of European, transatlantic and colonial historical and cultural interaction. Comprises over 275 entries ranging from 1,000 to 6,500 words arranged in A-Z format across three fully cross-referenced volumes Written by an international cast of leading and emerging scholars Entries explore genre development in prose, poetry, and drama of the Romantic period, key authors and their works, and key themes Also available online as part of the Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature, providing 24/7 access and powerful searching, browsing and cross-referencing capabilities