Romanticism and Subversive Suicide

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.

• List of FiguresAcknowledgementsPart I. Introduction and ContextIntroduction: Romantic Subversive Suicide and Biopower1. Period Approaches to Suicide2. ‘Give me Liberty or give me Death’: The Literary Context of Romantic Subversive SuicidePart II. Slavery, Biopower and Literary Subversive Suicide3. The Dying Negroes: Enforced Life and Slave Suicide as the Spectacle of Sentiment4. Refusing the Burden of the Body: Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley and the Suicide Note as Literary Form5. ‘Earth! take these atoms!’: The Religious Tract War and Suicidal Rebellion in Byron’s ManfredConclusion: The Afterlife of Romantic Subversive SuicideWorks CitedIndex

Michelle Faubert’s synthesis of Romanticist suicide discourse is both informed and elegant, and her foregrounding of abolitionist writing and the appropriation of its themes by women writers in the period bears an unmistakable relevance to present-day intersectional debates concerning human rights and social justice.