Suicide and the Gothic
1st Edition
Published on 8. August 2019
208 pages
978-1-5261-2009-0 (ISBN)
Description
Suicide and the Gothic is the first protracted study of how the act of self-destruction recurs and functions within one of the most enduring and popular forms of fiction. Comprising eleven original essays and an authoritative introduction, this collection explores how the act of suicide has been portrayed, interrogated and pathologised from the eighteenth century to the present. The featured fictions embrace both canonical and the less-studied texts and examine the crisis of suicide - a crisis that has personal, familial, religious, legal and medical implications - in European, American and Asian contexts. Featuring detailed interventions into the understanding of texts as temporally distant as Thomas Percy's Reliques and Patricia Highsmith's crime fictions, and movements as diverse as Wertherism, Romanticism and fin-de-siecle decadence, Suicide and the Gothic provides a comprehensive and compelling overview of this recurrent crisis in fiction and culture. -- .
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Manchester
United Kingdom
Edition type
Digital original
ISBN-13
978-1-5261-2009-0 (9781526120090)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
William Hughes | Andrew Smith
Suicide and the Gothic
Book
08/2019
Manchester University Press
€134.60
Shipment within 15-20 days
Persons
William Hughes is Professor of Gothic Studies at Bath Spa University Andrew Smith is Professor of English Studies at the University of Glamorgan where he is Co-Director of the Research Centre for Literature, Arts and Science (RCLAS)
Content
- Intro
- Front matter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Notes on contributors
- Series editor's preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: the most Gothic of acts - suicide in generic context
- Scottish revenants: Caledonian fatality in Thomas Percy's Reliques
- Male and female Werthers: Romanticism and Gothic suicide
- 'The supposed incipiency of mental disease': guilt, regret and suicide in three ghost stories by J. Sheridan Le Fanu
- 'The body of a self-destroyer': suicide and the self in the fin-de-siècle Gothic
- 'To be mistress of her own fate': suicide as control and contagion in the works of Richard Marsh
- Suicide as justice? The self-destroying Gothic villain in Pauline Hopkins' Of One Blood
- Gothic influences: darkness and suicide in the work of Patricia Highsmith
- Better not to have been: Thomas Ligotti and the 'suicide' of the human race
- Vampire suicide
- Under the dying sun: suicide and the Gothic in modern Japanese literature and culture
- 'I will abandon this body and take to the air': the suicide at the heart of Dear Esther
- Index
