2028 will mark the two hundredth anniversary of Thomas Lovell Beddoes’s completion of the first version of his masterpiece Death’s Jest-Book. This special issue of Studia Neophilologica, coinciding also with the centenary of a journal that has been the home of many significant essays on Beddoes’s writings, will offer new readings and accounts of Beddoes’s life, work, and reputation.
Contributions are invited for essays between 5 and 8,000 words on all aspects of Beddoes’s career. Topics might include:
· Death’s Jest-Book as a verse drama
· Beddoes’s relationships with his Romantic precursors and contemporaries
· Beddoes and Victorian and/or Modern poetry
· Beddoes’s sense of humour
· Beddoes’s political vision
· Beddoes’s engagement with German life and culture
· Beddoes and the gothic
· Beddoes’s and Romantic, Jacobean, and/or Elizabethan drama
· Beddoes and tragedy
· Beddoes and Switzerland
· Beddoes’s letters and other prose
· Beddoes and medicine
· Beddoes’s critical and editorial history
· Beddoes and evil
· Beddoes’s revisions
· Beddoes and love
Please send abstracts of 250–300 words to Andrew Hodgson at a.hodgson@bham.ac.uk by Friday 2 October 2026. If accepted, final submissions will be due for submission by Friday 7 January 2028. Please direct any queries to the same address.