In recent years, J. Sheridan Le Fanu's ghost-story collection In a Glass Darkly (1871) has been interpreted through its Gothic, medical and theological contexts. Yet the focus of these disparate literary and cultural discourses at the moment of death and – more pointedly – in the enactment of self-annihilation has never been explored. The first three narratives in the collection, ‘Green Tea’, ‘The Familiar’ and ‘Mr Justice Harbottle’, depict troubled, indeed persecuted, individuals – a diffident clergyman, a retired naval officer, a notorious and corrupt hanging judge – whose lives end prematurely following a personal contemplation of past actions known to themselves, but not to their contemporaries. This chapter will consider the deteriorating mental states of the Reverend Jennings and Captain Barton, the respective protagonists of ‘Green Tea’ and ‘The Familiar’, and the retrospective account which charts the final days of the unfortunate Mr Justice Harbottle. All three stories amply illustrate the complex relationship between introspection and self-destruction in the persecutory tradition of Gothic fiction.

Suicide clearly held a particular fascination for Richard Marsh (1857–1914), one of the most prolific and popular fiction writers of the period, with representations of suicide and reflections on it featuring widely throughout his Gothic oeuvre. But this interest goes further than the astute incorporation of cultural anxieties, which Marsh often used as a key technique for heightening the disturbing effects of his work, to considerations of its social, philosophical and scientific import. This is evidenced not only through his fiction but also by a seemingly unpublished essay (in the University of Reading archives), from 1891–1910, simply entitled ‘Suicide’ (which includes the characteristically provocative suggestion that ‘there may be something to be said even in favour of suicide’). This chapter draws on examples from a range of Marsh's multitudinous Gothic (or Gothic-inflected) texts, including Mrs Musgrave (1895), A Master of Deception (1913) and  A Spoiler of Men (1905), which Johan Höglund identifies as containing arguably ‘the first instance of the zombie character in British fiction’.

This chapter explores the ways that Pauline Hopkins employs the act of suicide as a way to achieve justice in Of One Blood; or, The Hidden Self, originally serialised in Colored American Magazine, 1902–1903. Although Hopkins’ novel is hard to categorise, many of its features – haunted houses, family secret, ghosts and incest – indicate its place within the Gothic tradition. On the very first page of the novel, the main character, Reuel Briggs, a Harvard medical student, asks ‘Is suicide wrong?’, setting up an ongoing obsession of the character and the novel. After many plot twists and revelations, the novel’s Gothic villain, Aubrey Livingston, commits murder. Another character intones ‘Justice will be done’, and shortly thereafter, Aubrey’s body is found floating in the Charles River. The narrator later explains that ‘“death by thine own hand”, [was] whispered in [Aubrey’s] ear while [he was] under hypnotic influence’; essentially he was forced to commit suicide. In Hopkins’ novel, suicide offers an unusual solution that both punishes the villain and relieves the victim of any sense that she has been the cause of the destruction of another life.

This chapter discusses the changing representation of suicide in selected Japanese literary and visual texts, focusing on four twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels (Kokoro by Natsume Soseki [1914], The Silent Cry by Kenzaburo Oe [1967], Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami [1987], and Gray Men by Tomotake Ishikawa [2012]), selected films and manga. The chapter argues that the discussed texts have departed from the historic/nationalistic notion of suicide as noble death in favour of a more Gothic positioning of the theme. This Gothic dimension is realised predominantly through the construction of the characters and the bleak landscapes they inhabit. Alienated from society; often living in self-imposed exile; prone to depression, or other forms of mental illness; trapped in toxic, dysfunctional relationships and elaborate masochistic rituals, these melancholy individuals accept suicide with fatalistic abandon as an inevitable conclusion to their insignificant lives, or embrace it as the ultimate act of non-conformism and defiance against authority. The chapter also examines apocalyptic visions of ‘nightmare Japan’ in films like Sion Sono’s controversial Suicide Circle (2001) and the manga it inspired (Furuya  Ukamaru, 2002), where suicide becomes symbolic of the ways that adults have failed the younger generations.

Thomas Ligotti, who began writing in the 1980s, is perhaps Gothic's best-kept secret. Until the recent publication of his first two collections of short stories by Penguin, his Gothic work (reminiscent, but by no means derivative, of Poe and Lovecraft) has remained relatively obscure. This chapter explores what could be termed Ligotti's materialistic pessimism, or the belief that conscious and rational life is inherently tragic, as it is largely dominated by the experience of pain and the realisation of the inevitability of death. More specifically, the chapter focuses on one of Ligotti's recurring solutions to the quandary of existence, suicide, in selected stories from Songs of a Dead Dreamer (1986), Grimscribe (1991), Teatro Grottesco (2006) and The Spectral Link (2014), but also in his non-fiction treatise The Conspiracy against the Human Race (2010) and his interviews in Born to Fear (2014). For Ligotti, antinatalism, or mass suicide as a way of preventing future generations from suffering the same fate, becomes an appealing, perhaps even the only real, option for a human race who has, thus far, preferred to believe in the absurdity of futurity and the fallacy of persistence.

The chapter argues that theories of grammaticalization as an independent unidirectional development of a lexical item into a functional item are misleading. Adopting a uniformitarian perspective, he submits that change involves three interrelated factors: The first, the process of recombination, refers to an innate human cognitive capacity which allows speaker/signer-learners (SL) to select specific linguistic features and recombine them into new syntactic variants. The second represents the feature pool of the variants to which SLs are exposed through contact; they are subject to the process of competition and selection. The third, commonly referred to as grammaticalization, has to do with population factors which may favor or hinder the spread of specific variants across a speech community.

Contrary to this approach based on universal multilingualism and contact as cornerstones of acquisition and change (Aboh 2015, 2020), classic examples of grammaticalization are particularly misleading because they aggregate different populations of different SL profiles as if they involved homogeneous monolingual or monomodal communities living in identical ecologies. Likewise, commonly used notions such as language-internal vs. contact-induced change become obsolete because they conceive of contact as the exceptional case. The author shows that language change is always the result of contact.

Applying historical ethnography, the chapter demonstrates that the nature of the interactions between Africans and the French along the West African coast from the late sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries did not favor the development of either a French-based creole or a pidgin. When the first French traders arrived in West Africa they capitalized on the century-long trade routes and social networks established by the Portuguese. They formed partnerships with powerful female commercial partners, who acted as language and cultural brokers between African and French traders. Over time, trading practices evolved from direct exchanges requiring mutual language learning to the emergence of professional interpreters, making it less necessary for the trading partners to learn each other’s language. By the eighteenth century, the French engaged in military conquests. The nature of interactions between African recruits and French officers and the types of population structures in which the former were inserted, did not favor the emergence of a pidgin-like variety identified in creolistics as Français Tirailleur. A detailed analysis of some of the grammatical structures of this putative variety suggests that Français Tirailleur was likely fabricated by those who described or quoted it in their books.