Suicide and the Gothic

William Hughes is Professor of Medical Humanities and Gothic Literature at Bath Spa UniversityAndrew Smith is Professor of Nineteenth-Century English Literature at the University of Sheffield

• Introduction: the most Gothic of acts – suicide in generic contextWilliam Hughes and Andrew Smith1 Scottish revenants: Caledonian fatality in Thomas Percy’s ReliquesFrank Ferguson and Danni Glover2 Male and female Werthers: Romanticism and Gothic suicideLisa Vargo 3 ‘The supposed incipiency of mental disease’: guilt, regret and suicide in three ghost stories by J. Sheridan Le FanuWilliam Hughes4 ‘The body of a self-destroyer’: suicide and the self in the fin de siècle GothicAndrew Smith5 ‘To be mistress of her own fate’: suicide as control and contagion in the works of Richard MarshGraeme Pedlingham6 Suicide as Justice? The self-destroying Gothic villain in Pauline Hopkins’ Of One BloodBridget M. Marshall7 Gothic influences: darkness and suicide in the work of Patricia HighsmithFiona Peters8 Better not to have been: Thomas Ligotti and the ‘Suicide’ of the human raceXavier Aldana Reyes and Rachid M’Rabty9 Vampire suicideJeffrey Andrew Weinstock10 Under the dying sun: suicide and the Gothic in modern Japanese literature and cultureKatarzyna Ancuta11 ‘I Will Abandon This Body and Take to the Air’: the suicide at the heart of Dear Esther Dawn Stobbart