First published in 2013. This two-part, eight-volume, reset edition draws together a range of sources from the early modern era through to the industrial age, to show the changes and continuities in responses to the social, political, legal and spiritual problems that self-murder posed. Part II, Volume 7 contains 1800–1850: Legal Contexts, Religious Writings and Medical Writers.

Cannabis is a genetically diverse plant that has been commodified for a variety of different purposes by many cultures throughout world history. For thousands of years, people have used its fiber, seed, and flowers to make rope and cloth, rig ships, feed people and livestock, concoct medicines, and alter states of consciousness. Until the nineteenth century, though, most Europeans and Americans were unaware of drug varieties of cannabis. The British encountered them in India and created western-style medicines that sold throughout the Atlantic world by the 1840s, but negative associations with Oriental intoxication and degeneracy sullied the plant’s reputation as a viable commodity. Now, after decades of transatlantic criminalization policies against cannabis in the twentieth century, it is making a comeback. In Commodifying Cannabis, Bradley J. Borougerdi traces the tangled histories of its use for fiber, medicine, and altered states of consciousness across the Atlantic world, focusing on the dynamic interplay between these three different cultural applications to explain why the plant has transformed so many times throughout history. The historical journey spans a vast geographical landscape and includes over three centuries of source material to illuminate the cultural foundations behind the myriad transformations cannabis has endured as a commodity in the Atlantic world.

If we could ask a Romantic reader of new poetry in 1820 to identify the most celebrated poet of the day after Byron, the chances are that he or she would reply with the name of Barry Cornwall'. Solicitor, dandy and pugilist, Cornwall -- pseudonym of Bryan Waller Procter (1787-1874) -- published his first poems in the Literary Gazette in late 1817. By February 1820, under the tutelage of Keats's mentor, Leigh Hunt, Cornwall had produced three volumes of verse. Marcian Colonna sold 700 copies in a single morning, a figure exceeding Keats's lifetime sales. Hazlitt's suppressed anthology, Select British Poets (1824), allocated Cornwall nine pages -- the same number as Keats, and more than Southey, Lamb or Shelley; Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine pronounced Cornwall a poet of 'originality and genius'; and in 1821, Gold's London Magazine announced that in terms of 'tenderness and delicacy' even Percy Shelley was 'surpassed very far indeed by Barry Cornwall'. It is difficult to square Cornwall's early nineteenth-century popularity with his subsequent neglect. In Bright Stars Richard Marggraf Turley concentrates on Cornwall's phenomenonal success between 1817 and 1823, emphatically returning an important and unjustly neglected Romantic author to critical focus. Marggraf Turley explores Cornwall's rivalry -- and at various junctures, political camaraderie -- with fellow Hunt protégé Keats, whose career exists in a fascinatingly mirrored relationship with his own trajectory into celebrity. The book argues that Cornwall helped to structure Keats's experience as a poet but also explores the central question of how Cornwall's racy and politically subversive poetry managed to establish a broad readership where Keatss similarly indecorous publications met with review hostility and readerly indifference.

It has become a truism that we all think in the narrative mode, both in everyday life and in science. But what does this mean precisely? Scholars tend to use the term ‘narrative’ in a broad sense, implying not only event-sequencing but also the representation of emotions, basic perceptual processes or complex analyses of data sets. The volume addresses this blind spot by using clear selection criteria: only non-fictional texts by experts are analysed through the lens of both classical and postclassical narratology – from Aristotle to quantum physics and from nineteenth-century psychiatry to early childhood psychology; they fall under various genres such as philosophical treatises, case histories, textbooks, medical reports, video clips, and public lectures. The articles of this volume examine the central but continuously shifting role that event-sequencing plays within scholarly and scientific communication at various points in history – and the diverse functions it serves such as eye witnessing, making an argument, inferencing or reasoning. Thus, they provide a new methodological framework for both literary scholars and historians of science and medicine.