- ホーム
- > 洋書
- > 英文書
- > Literary Criticism
Full Description
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
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Part I. Introduction and Context
Introduction: Romantic Subversive Suicide and Biopower
1. Period Approaches to Suicide
2. 'Give me Liberty or give me Death': The Literary Context of Romantic Subversive Suicide
Part II. Slavery, Biopower and Literary Subversive Suicide
3. The Dying Negroes: Enforced Life and Slave Suicide as the Spectacle of Sentiment
4. Refusing the Burden of the Body: Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley and the Suicide Note as Literary Form
5. 'Earth! take these atoms!': The Religious Tract War and Suicidal Rebellion in Byron's Manfred
Conclusion: The Afterlife of Romantic Subversive Suicide
Works Cited
Index
