Suicide Century

Literature and Suicide from James Joyce to David Foster Wallace

• Author(s): Andrew Bennett,
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Pages: 270
• ISBN_10: 110841804X
  ISBN_13: 9781108418041
  
• Language: en
• Categories: Literary Criticism / General , Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh , Literary Criticism / Poetry , Literary Criticism / Modern / 20th Century , Psychology / Suicide ,

Description:... 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.