Suicide and the Gothic
(Paperback)
Available Formats
Publishing Details
Suicide and the Gothic
By (Author) William Hughes
Edited by Andrew Smith
Manchester University Press
Manchester University Press
5th October 2023
United Kingdom
Classifications
General
Non Fiction
Literary studies: general
Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers
Literary studies: poetry and poets
Literary theory
809.38729
Physical Properties
Paperback
208
Width 138mm, Height 216mm, Spine 11mm
249g
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 Percys Reliques and Patricia Highsmiths crime fictions, and movements as diverse as Wertherism, Romanticism and fin-de-sicle decadence, Suicide and the Gothic provides a comprehensive and compelling overview of this recurrent crisis in fiction and culture.
Author Bio
William Hughes is Professor of Literature in English at the University of Macau, China
Andrew Smith is Professor of Nineteenth-Century English Literature at the University of Sheffield
