Haiti’s Literary Legacies: Romanticism and the Unthinkable Revolution

The essays gathered in Haiti’s Literary Legacies unpack the theoretical, historical, and political resonance of the Haitian revolution across a multiplicity of European and American Romanticisms, and include discussion of Haitian, British, French, German, and U.S. American traditions. Often referred to as the only successful slave revolt in history, the revolution that forged Haiti at once fulfilled, challenged, and ultimately surpassed Enlightenment conceptions of freedom and universality in ways that became crucial to transnational Romanticism, yet scholars and historians of Romanticism are only beginning to take the measure of its impact. This collection works at the intersection of Romantic and Caribbean studies to move that project forward, showing the myriad ways that literatures of the Romantic period respond to—and are transformed by—the Revolution in Haiti. Demonstrating the Revolution's centrality to romantic writing, Haiti's Literary Legacies urges an enlarged understanding of Romanticism and of its implications for the political, historical, and ecological genealogies of the present.