@article{ref1,
title="Donne's Biathanatos and the public sphere's vexing freedom",
journal="ELH",
year="2014",
author="Kuzner, James",
volume="81",
number="1",
pages="61-81",
abstract="With focus on Donne's Biathanatos, this essay examines relationships between self-killing, the public sphere, and personal freedom in the seventeenth century and in the present. Specifically, the essay explores how debates about the ethics of self-killing--and about whether publics are competent to decide those ethics--open onto debates about the kind of freedom that public life is thought to confer. Numerous scholars describe the histories of self-killing and of the early modern public sphere with emphasis on enabling, empowering escapes from authoritarian overdetermination. This essay, by contrast, argues that Biathanatos defends a freedom--both to debate suicide publicly and to decide about suicide privately--that is vexing, not enabling, and that induces a hobbling, yet salutary epistemological humility.<p /> <p>Language: en</p>",
language="en",
issn="0013-8304",
doi="10.1353/elh.2014.0002",
url="http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/elh.2014.0002"
}