A01=Michelle Faubert
Abolitionist literature
Author_Michelle Faubert
biopower
Category=DSBF
Category=DSK
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
freedom
human rights
Lord Byron
Mary Shelley
Mary Wollstonecraft
Romanticism
suicide
Product details
- ISBN 9781399527538
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 30 Apr 2025
- Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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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
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.
