ABSTRACT
The epilogue introduces the changes in the representation of murder that typified the years before the outbreak of the Great War, especially in radical avant-garde movements such as Vorticism, and the Camden Town Group, but also in much more bourgeoisie texts, such as Arthur Pinero’s plays. Unlike what traditionally exemplified the culture of violence in nineteenth-century England, chiefly the crude conclusiveness and graphicality of murder images, these works are often much more ambiguous. The turn to suicide in literature and drama, as a means of overcoming social and emotional deadlocks and as an alternative for murder, also became increasingly typical in the late nineteenth century, and in some ways “replaced” the trope of murder.
