ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to revise the use of Romantic irony both as a putative influence on and as a mode of reading Death's Jest-Book, and to consider its specific implications for Thomas Lovell Beddoes's cumulative discourse on immortality. By far the most thorough and illuminating study of Beddoes and the Germans has been Anne Harrex's article 'Death's Jest-Book and the German Contribution', divided into two sections, one on literary and philosophical influences, and one specifically addressing the control of Romantic irony. The idealism of the quest for Luz, the philosopher's stone of the afterlife, is not a sustainable or stable myth, since it offers nothing to withstand the visitations of despair. It becomes apparent, then, that the ironies of the first phase of Beddoes's revision are making Death's Jest-Book less dramatic; it loses in drama as it gains in self-conscious literariness and awareness of the arbitrary tyranny of authorship.
