Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Liberty and Death
2. Chained to Life and Misery
3. Writ in Water
4. In Sympathy
5. Marvelous Boys
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Deanna P. Koretsky is Assistant Professor of English at Spelman College.
"Deanna P. Koretsky's Death Rights is this year's one notable study
encountering Romanticism as the archive of the Middle Passage and
British racialism." — Studies in English Literature
"…Koretsky's objection to the racially exclusionary myth of
Romantic suicide is novel and compelling, an argument to be
necessarily reckoned with by current and future scholars working on
the literary and cultural history of suicide in the long eighteenth
century. When framed in this way, it promises to be an
indispensable contribution to the field. Moreover, the book is
another important reminder of the racially coded myths scholars
inherit and still employ in the broader fields of Romanticism and
British literary history." — Journal of British Studies
"[Koretsky engages] with not only canonical romantic texts but also
those that have resisted (or been resisted by) canonization. She
gives weight to both Wollstonecraft and Mattie Jackson, reads
Frankenstein against Destroyer, places Chatterton next to Cobain
next to 'Clout Cobain.' In doing so, she shows the way that these
texts have been misread, under-read, or read along deliberate and
occlusive lines, and, through her own analysis, demonstrates ways
of reading that are rich, resistant, and offer new considerations
of romantic constructions and their legacies. Death Rights is an
engaging and essential contribution to not only nineteenth-century
studies as a whole, but also studies of whiteness, slavery and
abolition, and suicide." — Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies
"…Death Rights is daring, original, and a valuable contribution to
a scholarly conversation on race and rights that is a long time
coming." — European Romantic Review
"This timely and sensitively written book raises pertinent
questions about the possibilities and limits of the liberal
imaginary that obliterates difference and the exclusionary politics
of who is considered worthy of personhood, agency, citizenship,
humanity, and inclusion. More importantly, the book does this at a
time when, as per the report published in 2019 by the US
Congressional Black Caucus, suicide is the second leading cause of
death among African American teenagers. The Black Lives Matter
movement makes the book even more relevant for scholars interested
in the Romantic age, intersectional identities, and the philosophy
and politics of liberal modernity." — H-Net Reviews (H-Death)
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