Romanticism and Subversive Suicide: Human Rights, Existential Freedom and Biopower

by Michelle Faubert

Overview

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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781399527538
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	04/30/2025
Series:	Edinburgh Critical Studies in Romanticism
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

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.

Table of 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