British Literature, Suicide, and the Bounds of Liberalism in the Romantic Era

FAIN: HB-262280-19

Deanna Koretsky
Spelman College (Atlanta, GA 30314-4399)

Completion of a book-length project on political and literary relationships between British Romanticism, suicide, the transatlantic slave trade.

This monograph traces the racialized antecedents of a well-known figure in British Romantic literature, the melancholy genius who dies by suicide. The project demonstrates how Romantic-era writers also used the idea of suicide to interrogate the roots of racial inequality based in liberal political philosophies. Individual chapters investigate the period's notions of property, personhood, citizenship, and sympathy in works by canonical and lesser-known writers of African and European descent, including Thomas Day and John Bicknell, Olaudah Equiano, Mary and Percy Shelley, William Wordsworth, William Wells Brown, and James Williams. This will be the first monograph focused on the Romantic period within a growing bibliography on the history of suicide and its role in political discourses.

Associated Products

Death Rights: Romantic Suicide, Race, and the Bounds of Liberalism (Book)
Title: Death Rights: Romantic Suicide, Race, and the Bounds of Liberalism
Author: Deanna P. Koretsky
Abstract: Death Rights presents an antiracist critique of British romanticism by deconstructing one of its organizing tropes—the suicidal creative “genius.” Putting texts by Olaudah Equiano, Mary Shelley, John Keats, and others into critical conversation with African American literature, black studies, and feminist theory, Deanna P. Koretsky argues that romanticism is part and parcel of the legal and philosophical discourses underwriting liberal modernity’s antiblack foundations. Read in this context, the trope of romantic suicide serves a distinct political function, indexing the limits of liberal subjectivity and (re)inscribing the rights and freedoms promised by liberalism as the exclusive province of white men. The first book-length study of suicide in British romanticism, Death Rights also points to the enduring legacy of romantic ideals in the academy and contemporary culture more broadly. Koretsky challenges scholars working in historically Eurocentric fields to rethink their identification with epistemes rooted in antiblackness. And, through discussions of recent cultural touchstones such as Kurt Cobain’s resurgence in hip-hop and Victor LaValle’s comic book sequel to Frankenstein, Koretsky provides all readers with a trenchant analysis of how eighteenth-century ideas about suicide continue to routinize antiblackness in the modern world.
Year: 2021
Primary URL: https://www.worldcat.org/title/death-rights-romantic-suicide-race-and-the-bounds-of-liberalism/oclc/1159637141&referer=brief_results
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781438482897
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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