Suicide Century

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.

• Offers a wide-ranging interdisciplinary perspective on the question of suicide in philosophical, historical, medical and literary contexts, giving readers new understandings of the cultural representations of a key human impulse and action
• Presents detailed readings of works by seven key writers from the period: Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce, Stevie Smith, Sylvia Plath, David Foster Wallace, Michael Cunningham, Jeffrey Eugenides, offering new insights into works by major twentieth-century authors
• Develops a theory of suicide ideation as a key component in literary representation, giving new insight into the cultural value of literature