Suicide century : literature and suicide from James Joyce to David Foster Wallace / Andrew Bennett.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bennett, Andrew, 1960 December 2- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Suicide in literature.

English literature--20th century--History and criticism.

English literature.

American literature--20th century--History and criticism.

American literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (vi, 270 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2017.

Summary:

Suicide Century investigates suicide as a prominent theme in twentieth-century and contemporary literature. Andrew Bennett argues that with the waning of religious and legal prohibitions on suicide in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the increasing influence of medical and sociological accounts of its causes and significance in the twentieth century, literature responds to the act and idea as an increasingly normalised but incessantly baffling phenomenon. Discussing works by a number of major authors from the long twentieth century, the book explores the way that suicide makes and unmakes subjects, assumes and disrupts meaning, induces and resists empathy, and insists on and makes inconceivable our understanding of ourselves and of others.

Contents:

Literature and suicide

The animal that can commit suicide: history, philosophy, literature

A world without meaning: Ford Madox Ford and modernist suicide

The love that kills: love, art, and everyday suicide in James Joyce

Death death death lovely death: Stevie Smith, Sylvia Plath, and the idea of suicide

What must it have been like?: suicide and empathy in contemporary fiction

Inside David Foster Wallace's head: attention, loneliness, boredom, and suicide

Epilogue: the contemporary suicide memoir.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 29 Sep 2017).

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN:

1-108-30469-9

1-108-28413-2

1-108-30769-8