The Contemporary Writer and Their Suicide

This volume is the continuation of the book Suicide in Modern Literature, edited by Josefa Ros Velasco. Considering the positive reception of this book, Ros Velasco launches the second part, entitled The Contemporary Writer and their Suicide. This time, leading representatives of various disciplines analyze the literary, philosophical, and biographical works of contemporary writers worldwide who attempted to commit suicide or achieved their goal, looking for covert and overt clues about their intentions in their writings. This book aims to continue shedding light on the social and structural causes that lead to suicide and on the suicidal mind, but also to show that people assiduous to writing usually reflect their intentions to commit suicide in their writings, to explain how these frequently veiled intentions can be revealed and interpreted, and to highlight the potential of artistic, philosophical, and autobiographical writing as a tool to detect suicidal ideation and prevent its consummation in vulnerable people. This book analyzes several case studies and their allusions to their contexts and the socio-structural and environmental violence and pressures they suffered, expressions of their will and agency, feelings of dislocation between the individual, reality, and existential alienation, and literary styles, writing techniques, and metaphorical language.

Josefa Ros Velasco is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Researcher at the Complutense University of Madrid, Spain. Prior to this, she was a Teaching Assistant and a Postdoctoral Researcher at Harvard University (2017-2021). She holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy (2017, Complutense University of Madrid) and is specialized in Boredom Studies. She is the president of the International Society of Boredom Studies and the author of the book La enfermedad del aburrimiento [The Disease of Boredom] (Alianza Editorial, 2022) and editor of the books Boredom is In Your Mind (Springer, 2019); The Culture of Boredom (Brill, 2020); The Faces of Depression in Literature (Peter Lang, 2020), and Suicide in Modern Literature (Springer Nature, 2021). Recently, she won the National Research Prize of Spain.