Romanticism and Subversive SuicideHuman Rights, Existential Freedom and Biopower

• Traces the history and literary theme of suicide over centuries
• Shows how slavery and abolition shaped ideas about human freedom in the British Romantic era
• Fills a gap in Foucault’s thinking about biopower by addressing its application to the enslaved and women

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.