Milton, Haiti and Revolutionary Tragic Thought

Why should the English Revolution in the seventeenth century and its eighteenth-century Haitian equivalent be considered together? Hannah Crawforth's strikingly innovative book provides compelling answers. It tells the story of two very different revolutionary moments in which Greek tragedy shaped radical political thought, explored through John Milton's republican writings and later Haitian anti-colonial narratives. It spans the most brutal years of the transatlantic slave trade in the Caribbean – from Oliver Cromwell's failed attempt to colonize 'Hispaniola' and his violent settlement of Jamaica in the 1650s, to the uprising in the 1790s of formerly enslaved people against their colonial oppressors led by Toussaint Louverture. These insurrectionary narratives are presented in parallel, while their political and historical dissimilarities are honoured. By juxtaposing two political, historical and literary events never brought together before, the author offers fresh readings of them both. Her revisionist understanding of tragedy boldly reimagines revolutionary thought.

Hannah Crawforth is Reader in Early Modern Literature at King's College London. She is the author of Etymology and the Invention of English in Early Modern Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and co-author of Shakespeare in London (2015). She has published extensively on poetry, both modern and early modern, and on writers who include W. E. B. DuBois, Fulke Greville, Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, John Milton, Edmund Spenser and Evie Shockley.