Romanticism and Subversive Suicide

Human Rights, Existential Freedom and Biopower

AvMichelle Faubert

Häftad, Engelska, 2026

Del i serien Edinburgh Critical Studies in Romanticism

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Romanticism and Subversive Suicide: Human Rights, Existential Freedom and Biopower traces the roots and expression of the literary theme of subversive suicide in the British Romantic era through key texts from different genres, from novels to letters, and poems to plays. A range of commentaries on suicide – including newspaper reports, coroners’ inquests, religious tracts, sermons, medical studies, and legal texts – reveals the existence of a distinctly Romantic-era suicide debate, the fervour of which reflects the rise of biopower, as defined by Michel Foucault, to which suicide was the ultimate threat. This debate features a spirited defence of Enlightenment ideas proclaiming the Western liberal subject to be existentially free, as well as the broad cultural influence of the British slave trade, which shaped both national awareness of what it meant to be a subject and the definition of the human at the time

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum:2026-10-01
Mått:156 x 234 x undefined mm
Format:Häftad
Språk:Engelska
Serie:Edinburgh Critical Studies in Romanticism
Antal sidor:296
Förlag:Edinburgh University Press
ISBN:9781399527545

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Michelle Faubert is Professor of Romanticism at the University of Manitoba and Visiting Fellow at Northumbria University. Her monographs are Granville Sharp’s Uncovered Letter and the Zong Massacre (2018) and Rhyming Reason: The Poetry of Romantic-Era Psychologists (2009). She has also published Broadview Press editions of novels by Mary Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft, the Shelley-Godwin Archive edition of Mary Shelley’s Mathilda, and multiple essay volumes and journal issues, in addition to numerous articles and chapters on Romanticism and suicide, the history of psychiatry and madness, and early feminism.

Recensioner i media

Michelle Faubert’s synthesis of Romanticist suicide discourse is both informed and elegant, and her foregrounding of abolitionist writing and the appropriation of its themes by women writers in the period bears an unmistakable relevance to present-day intersectional debates concerning human rights and social justice.

Innehållsförteckning

List of FiguresAcknowledgementsPart I. Introduction and ContextIntroduction: Romantic Subversive Suicide and Biopower1. Period Approaches to Suicide2. ‘Give me Liberty or give me Death’: The Literary Context of Romantic Subversive SuicidePart II. Slavery, Biopower and Literary Subversive Suicide3. The Dying Negroes: Enforced Life and Slave Suicide as the Spectacle of Sentiment4. Refusing the Burden of the Body: Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley and the Suicide Note as Literary Form5. ‘Earth! take these atoms!’: The Religious Tract War and Suicidal Rebellion in Byron’s ManfredConclusion: The Afterlife of Romantic Subversive SuicideWorks CitedIndex