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  1. Home
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  3. Dying to be English
  • This book is no longer available to purchase from Cambridge Core
Publisher:
Pickering & Chatto
Online publication date:
December 2014
Online ISBN:
9781848931114
Subjects:
Literature, Literary Texts
Information

Book description

Enlightenment assumptions regarding the gendering of suicide still persist in coroners’ investigations, statistical analyses and the media’s coverage of high-profile deaths. This study examines the presentation of suicide within the genre of the eighteenth-century novel as both a feminine action and a declaration of national identity. A perceived rise in suicide rates in the eighteenth-century led to the topic’s identification as an ‘English Malady’ and its treatment within the novel as a public, society-defining gesture.Using the novels of several key writers of the period, including Frances Burney, Eliza Haywood and Samuel Richardson, McGuire demonstrates that their work inscribes a nationalist imperative to frame suicide as self-sacrifice. By considering the eighteenth-century novel as a cultural document, she combines literary analysis with cultural history, creating an innovative and challenging picture of the relationship between suicide, gender and national identity.

Reviews

"'McGuire’s arguments are carefully crafted, nuanced, and often strikingly original in their assessment of how suicide works in a range of disparate and often unwieldy novels. Dying to be English proves the reward of bringing multiple disciplinary lenses to bear upon the phenomenon of suicide and its broad cultural resonance.'"

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