• Introduction to "Suicidal Romanticism:Origins and Influences"
• Michelle Faubert (bio)

The essays in this issue of Studies in the Literary Imagination broaden the important conversation on suicide by providing newly recovered ways of thinking about it in relation to Romantic-era cultural forces, the prehistory of these ways of thinking, and their lasting effects.¹ What marks this issue as unique amongst recent works on suicide is its breadth: it explores literature on suicide by men and women and in a range of genres from poetry to fiction to drama, and, while the main focus is on the Romantic period, it also makes reference to works on suicide from the Classical to the Modern period. Some unexpected writers are shown to be significant contributors to the concept of Romantic suicide, too; these include William Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, Maria Edgeworth, Thomas Herbert Lister, and, perhaps most surprisingly, Tennessee Williams. Moreover, the topic of suicide is paired with unusual forms and subjects here, including: the silver fork novel of the late-Romantic period; the Modern drama; religious enthusiasm; infanticide; incest; and interracial marriage. What the contributors to this issue demonstrate through these wide-ranging treatments is that the power—perhaps even the shock-value—of Romantic suicide made it a useful tool for a range of authors writing on vastly disparate topics. While many critical treatments of Romantic suicide have demonstrated how the topic was used as a political tool—to discuss human rights and protest slavery, gender inequality, and the confines of marriage for women²—several of the essays in this issue reveal the unexpected uses to which the topic was put in the literature of the period.

The subject of suicide was of great official and popular concern to the British, who believed that they were uniquely afflicted with the propensity to kill themselves. However, the symbolic import of suicide was hotly contested in various texts of the Romantic era. For instance, in the Neoclassical mode and in some radical literature, suicide was lauded as heroic. It was also a popular element in the sometimes vapid, tear-jerking literature of Sensibility and tales of celebrity suicides, such as that of the young poet, Thomas Chatterton. In Gothic novels, such as James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, self-killers represent horror [End Page v] and utter sinfulness, and yet many other writers, following Robert Burton's influential Anatomy of Melancholy of 1621, attribute suicidality to extreme religious devotion. Suicide could also convey revolution, the defiance of tyranny, and a defense of one's existential and bodily autonomy—all key characteristics of Romanticism as it has traditionally been defined. Nevertheless, by the end of the period, the legal understanding of suicide was linked almost invariably to victimhood, rather than to resistance: English courts found suicides to have been insane in over 97% of cases, a view that dominates today's understanding of suicide (Marsh 93). Given the various significances of suicide in the period, then, this issue does not make an attempt to flatten out these meanings into a single message, but, rather, it explores the subtleties and depths of the meanings of Romantic suicide, even as it considers the concepts—including ones from other eras—that shaped it, and those it helped to shape.

In a sense, to focus on the influences and origins of ideas about suicide in Romantic-era texts, the theme of this issue of Studies in Literary Imagination is to search for the history of—even an explanation for—what is largely considered to be aberrant, unnatural, and perhaps what divides us from our fellow animals. In From Autothanasia to Suicide: Self-killing in Classical Antiquity, Anton van Hooff asks, "Is man really placing himself outside nature by laying hands upon himself?" (10). Van Hooff goes on to relate Aristotle's tale of "a Scythian horse-breeder [who] tried to have a young stallion mate with its mother. The animal refused, but later it was cheated when the mare's head had been covered. Discovering the truth, it jumped into an abyss" (10). Aristotle's story implies that suicide is, indeed, natural—but it also implies that the incest taboo...

• “自杀浪漫主义：起源和影响”简介
• 米歇尔·福伯特（生物）

本期《文学想象力研究》中的文章通过提供与浪漫主义时代的文化力量有关的自杀观念，这些思维方式的史前历史及其持久影响，扩大了关于自杀的重要讨论。^1个在最近有关自杀的著作中，这个问题的独特之处在于它的广度：它探讨了有关男女自杀的文学作品，涉及从诗歌到小说到戏剧的各种流派，并且主要关注浪漫时期。还提到了从古典到现代的自杀作品。一些意想不到的作家也被证明是浪漫主义自杀观念的重要贡献者。其中包括威廉·华兹华斯，玛丽·雪莱，玛丽亚·埃奇沃斯，托马斯·赫伯特·李斯特，以及最令人惊讶的是田纳西·威廉姆斯。此外，自杀的主题在这里与不寻常的形式和主题配对，包括：浪漫晚期的银叉小说；现代戏剧；宗教热情；杀婴 乱伦; 和异族通婚。通过广泛的处理，这个问题的贡献者表明，浪漫自杀的力量-甚至是震撼价值-使其成为许多作者在不同主题上写作的有用工具。尽管对浪漫主义自杀的许多批评性治疗表明了该主题如何被用作政治工具，但仍在讨论人权和抗议奴隶制，性别不平等以及妇女的婚姻范围。²本期的几篇论文揭示了该主题在该时期文学作品中的意想不到的用途。

自杀这个话题在英国引起了官方和民众的极大关注，他们认为自杀是他们自杀的唯一受害者。然而，在浪漫主义时代的各种文献中，象征性的自杀意味引起了激烈的争论。例如，在新古典主义模式和一些激进文学中，自杀被誉为英雄。它在有时敏感，敏感的催人泪下的文学和名人自杀的故事（例如年轻诗人托马斯·查特顿（Thomas Chatterton）的故事）中也很受欢迎。在哥特式小说中，例如詹姆斯·霍格（James Hogg）的《有罪人的私人回忆录》，自谋杀手代表着恐怖[End Page v]和极度犯罪，在罗伯特·伯顿（Robert Burton）的影响力之后，还有许多其他作家忧郁的解剖1621年，自杀倾向归因于极端的宗教奉献。自杀还可以传达革命，对暴政的蔑视以及对一个人的生存和身体自治的辩护-浪漫主义的所有关键特征都是传统上定义的。然而，到该时期结束时，对自杀的法律理解几乎总是与受害人联系在一起，而不是与抗争联系在一起：英国法院发现，在97％以上的案件中自杀都是疯子，这一观点在当今对自杀的理解中占主导地位（沼泽93）。鉴于这段时期自杀的各种意义，这个问题并没有试图将这些含义统一为一个单一的信息，而是探索了浪漫自杀含义的微妙和深度，

从某种意义上讲，为了关注浪漫主义时代文本中自杀观念的影响和起源，本期《文学想象力研究》的主题是寻找在很大程度上被认为是“自杀”的历史-甚至是对它的解释。异常的，不自然的，也许是使我们与其他动物分开的原因。在《从自动死亡到自杀：古典上的自我杀戮》中”，安东·范·霍夫（Anton van Hooff）问：“人真的是通过把手放在自己身上而将自己置于大自然之外吗？” （10）。范·霍夫（Van Hooff）继续讲述亚里士多德（Aristotle）的故事：“一个赛斯基亚的种马者试图与它的母亲有一个年轻的种马伴侣。该动物拒绝了，但后来在母马的头被覆盖时被骗了。发现真相，它跳入深渊”（10）。亚里士多德的故事暗示自杀确实是自然的，但也暗示着乱伦禁忌...