Romanticism and Subversive Suicide: Human Rights, Existential Freedom and Biopower - Couverture souple

Faubert, Michelle

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1399527541 ISBN 13 : 9781399527545

Editeur : Edinburgh University Press, 2026

Synopsis

Examining the Romantic literary theme of suicide, this book positions slavery and abolition as central to the Romantic era

• Traces the history and literary theme of suicide over centuries
• Shows how slavery and abolition shaped ideas about human freedom in the British Romantic era
• Fills a gap in Foucault’s thinking about biopower by addressing its application to the enslaved and women

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.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

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.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Edinburgh University Press
• Date d'édition: 2026
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1399527541
• ISBN 13: 9781399527545
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 296
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible