This study examines the presentation of suicide within the genre of the eighteenth-century novel. Referencing several key writers of the period, McGuire demonstrates that their work inscribes a nationalist imperative to frame suicide as self-sacrifice.
'McGuire's arguments are carefully crafted, nuanced, and often strikingly original in their assessment of how suicide works in a range of disparate and often unwieldy novels. Dying to be English proves the reward of bringing multiple disciplinary lenses to bear upon the phenomenon of suicide and its broad cultural resonance.' Eighteenth-Century Fiction
Innehållsförteckning
Introduction: A Genealogy of Suicide; Chapter 1 Suicide and Spectrality in Eliza Haywood’s Amatory Fiction; Chapter 2 Mors Voluntaria: Clarissa and the Agency of Martyrdom; Chapter 3 English Maladies and Material Culture at Mid-Century; Chapter 4 The Pathology of Sentiment: Politics, Sacrifice and Wertherism in the English Novel of Sensibility; Chapter 5 ‘The Death of Reason’: Vitalism, Transnational Identity and Frances Burney; concl Conclusion;