“The war depends on you”: Suicidal Romanticism in Jeff Buckley’s Grace

Abstract

ABSTRACT In recent decades, scholars including Jerome McGann and Anne K. Mellor have interrogated the previously stable borders of various moments of literary criticism and philosophy, including Romanticism and its consideration of conflict, unity, and identity. Such interrogation has resituated texts not traditionally associated with the Romantic period in new theoretical lights. Surveying landscapes of contemporary sensibilities of masculinity, this article will argue that the central figures in Jeff Buckley’s Grace represent a trope in Romantic texts the author has developed from Nicholas Saul’s exploration of “Romantic suicide.” Suicidal Romanticism encapsulates Buckley’s subject in its search for an authentic and unique identity and eventual disavowal of identity altogether. McGann’s widening of the Romantic landscape provides credence for broader swaths of connection between cultural periods, literary criticisms, and textual forms, situating artists like Buckley within the bounds of a Romanticism engrossed in the examination of conflicted personalities searching for meaning and wholeness.