Death Rights: Romantic Suicide, Race, and the Bounds of Liberalism

Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
	The Argument
	Contexts
	Methods
	Chapters
Chapter 1 Liberty and Death
	John Locke, Property, and Self-Destruction
	The Dying Negro and the Politics of Freedom
	The Suicide Note and the Poetics of Personhood
	Life After (Social) Death
Chapter 2 Chained to Life and Misery
	Foundations: Mary Wollstonecraft, Suicide, and the Critique of Sensibility
	Racial Sensibility and the Bounds of “Woman” in Mary Robinson and Claire de Duras
	Flickering Whiteness in Felicia Hemans’s Suicide Poems
	Revising Racial Sensibility in The Story of Mattie J. Jackson
Chapter 3 Writ in Water
	(Im)possible Life: Blackness and Romanticism
	Equiano’s Black Ecology
	Black Optimism and Equiano’s Poetic Turn
	Keats’s Posthumous Life
Chapter 4 In Sympathy
	Frankenstein and the Suicide Debates
	The Social Function of Sympathy
	Friendly Antipathies
	Blackness and the End(s) of Liberalism
Chapter 5 Marvelous Boys
	The Mythic Structure of Romantic Suicide
	Conclusion: Black Lives and Dead White Guys
Notes
Bibliography
Index