Contents

Barbara T. Gates, Alumni Distinguished Professor of English, University of Delaware

• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction
• Abbreviations
• I. Verdicts
• II. Willing to Be
• III. Cases and Classes: Sensational Suicides and Their Interpreters
• IV. Bad and Far Better Things
• V. Other Times, Other Cultures, Other Selves
• VI. Monsters of Self-Destruction
• Varney the Vampire, or The Feast of Blood (1847)
• John Merrick, the Elephant Man
• Nell, Quilp, and Accidental Suicides in Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop
• Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
• Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
• The Divided Self and Self-Destruction in Tennyson's Idylls of the King
• Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray
• VII. Suicidal Women: Fact or Fiction?
• VIII. Century's End: "The Coming Universal Wish Not to Live"

Last modified 4 June 2001