Suicide and the Gothic

Suicide and the Gothic is the first extended study of how the act of suicide 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 suicide has been portrayed, interrogated and pathologised from the eighteenth century to the present. The featured fictions include both the enduringly canonical and the less-studied, and the geographical compass of the volume embraces not merely British, European and American authors but also the highly pertinent issue of suicide in modern Japanese culture. 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-siècle decadence, Suicide and the Gothic provides a comprehensive and compelling overview of this recurrent crisis - a crisis that has personal, familial, religious, legal and medical implications - in fiction and culture. Suicide and the Gothic will prove a central - and provocative - resource for those engaged in the study of the genre from the eighteenth century to the present, but will also support scholars working in complementary literary fields from Romanticism to crime fiction, theoretical disciplines from the medical humanities to Queer Studies, as well as the broader fields of American and European studies. Its contents are as relevant to the undergraduate reader as they are to the advanced postgraduate and the faculty member: suicide is a crucial subject in culture as well as criticism.