Overview

This is a history of the representation of suicide from the ancient world to its decriminalization in the 20th century. After looking at instances of voluntary death in ancient Greece and the famous tale of the lovers Pyramus and Thisbe, Ron Brown moves on to discuss the contrast between the extraordinary absence of such figures in early Christianity and the proliferation of images of biblical suicides in the late Medieval era. He emphasizes how differing attitudes to suicide in the early modern world slowly merged together, and pays particular attention to the one-time chasm between so-called heroic suicide and the ""crying crime"" of self-destruction.

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9781861891051

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Reviews

'The Art of Suicide is a fascinating cultural history of images of self-murder from antiquity to the present, taking in Dido, Judas, Ophelia and Vincent along the way.'- Books of the Year, The Independent 'scholarly and informative ... and yet it is not a dry book; far from it' - Church Times

Author Information

Ron M. Brown is Teaching Fellow in the Faculty of Health and Environment at Leeds Metropolitan University.

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