Romanticism and Suicide in Britain, 1770-1822

FAIN: FT-60125-12

Nicole Reynolds
Ohio University (Athens, OH 45701-1361)

This project explores the relationship between British Romanticism and the practice and interpretation of suicide. While grounded primarily in literary texts, it incorporates a variety of print media across a wide range of disciplinary interests to show how the topic of suicide crossed the boundaries between public and private life and preoccupied practitioners in many of Romantic Britain's intellectual, professional, and artistic fields. Currently, most discussion of suicide occurs either within a religious and moral discourse or a psychiatric one. A look at Romantic Britain reveals that suicide is a far more complex social and cultural phenomenon than either of these two conceptual modes allow. "Romanticism and Suicide" challenges scholars in related humanities fields to consider that the empirical facts of suicide "medical, legal, historical" cannot be interpreted independently from the means through which they are represented and the unique culture within which they unfold