The Haitian Revolution in the Early Republic of Letters

Reviews / Votes

This ground-breaking book recovers the crucial role of Haiti in shaping American culture during the first two decades of the nineteenth century. Faherty overturns what we thought we knew about this supposedly barren period. By showing how and why Haiti was erased from the white American imagination, Faherty uncovers a rich and dramatic literary history in which Haiti inspired different visions of what freedom and resistance might look like in the modern world. * Andy Doolen, University of Kentucky * Incipient Fevers argues that "the seismic force of the Haitian Revolution" shaped early U.S. literary culture at the dawn of the nineteenth century. This revolution has long taken a back seat to the U.S. and French Revolutions, and Faherty compellingly demonstrates that its suppression in U.S. historiography and literary history led to the creation of an imagined "canonical interregnum" roughly between 1800 and 1820...Much like Cathy Davidson's pivotal Revolution and the Word reshaped the field over two decades ago, this book has the potential to radically transform early and nineteenth-century U.S. literary studies by expanding the horizon of the literature that we study and how we write about and teach it. * John Funchion, University of Miami * Incipient Fevers is an original and eye-opening account of the foundational significance of the Haitian Revolution to literary production in the early United States and, indeed, to the larger overall history of American literature. In this superb study, Duncan Faherty demonstrates not only that the print public sphere of the early U.S. was saturated with accounts of and references to the Haitian Revolution,...The doppelgaenger nature of the Haitian Revolution thus served as what Faherty aptly terms a "hauntology" of the U.S. print public sphere in the early years of the nineteenth century and beyond. The U.S. remained (and remains) haunted by the presence of a more radical revolution-one that it must continually invoke and contain in order to imagine itself as at once free and white. * Elizabeth Dillon, Distinguished Professor of English, Northeastern University, USA * Faherty's thinking and writing are replete with clarity and elegance, rendering just how much the materiality of aesthetics intersects with political and social formation. The introduction, in particular, makes a striking, readable, inspiring best case for beholding Haiti's presence in U.S. national literary imagining. * Kevin Quashie, Brown University * In this vital contribution to hemispheric American Studies, Duncan Faherty makes a case for redressing a crucial blind spot in American literary history, namely, the years 1800-1820, an era so often imagined as a fallow period of cultural production....Outstanding. * Chris Bongie, Transatlantica *