“An Observance of Silence to the Events”

2019 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 58-70
Author(s):  
Shelby Johnson
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Caribbean History ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
The Wanderer ◽  
The French Revolution

Abstract Juliet Granville, the protagonist of Frances Burney’s novel The Wanderer (1814), enters the novel fleeing the French Revolution and disguised in blackface. This article argues that Juliet’s act of racial counterfeiting implicitly gestures toward the Haitian Revolution without naming that historical touchstone and emblematizes a theory of trace histories that Burney articulates in the novel’s dedication. There, she sketches an agonistic vision of history through what she calls “traces,” where events “though already historical, have left traces” that have been “handed down . . . from generation to generation” and tarry in the present. Burney frames the trace as an afterlife of an event that cannot be quite integrated into the broader scope of “history” as such but which leaves behind profound formal remainders. Burney’s dedication thus theorizes how to read Romantic-era novels for those fragments of form, and Juliet’s disguise replots erasures of Caribbean history as a problem of reading.

The Sublime Turn Away from Empire: Wordsworth's Encounter with Colonial Slavery, 1802

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Kelly Persyn
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Early Years ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
Eventual Death ◽  
The French Revolution

Abstract "The Sublime Turn Away from Empire" argues that the Haitian Revolution—and Toussaint l'Ouverture's role in it—heavily influenced Wordsworth during his early years and that the1802 sonnet to Toussaint l'Ouverture epitomizes the poet's development of the "sublime turn." The Wordsworthian sublime, often interpreted in part as a reaction to the violence of the French Revolution, thus appears in this article as a reaction to the frightening and incomprehensible facts of colonial slavery and revolution—the very realities responsible for L'Ouverture's capture, imprisonment, and eventual death in France's Fort de Joux. In this context, the poet formulates his sublime turn as a turn away from the recognition of material slavery and bondage and toward an imaginative freedom nationed specifically English. In pursuing the argument, the article reviews the history of the Haitian Revolution together with the history of Wordsworth's poetic development from 1790 to 1802. In paying special attention to the 1802 sonnets, the article highlights Wordsworth's juxtaposition of French slavery and English liberty and draws on work by Laura Doyle and Alison Hickey to argue that Wordsworth's valorization of nature and nation has the effect of sublimating his own, and his reader's, recognition of empire and race. Ultimately, though Wordsworth speaks of l'Ouverture in a markedly admiring tone, he counsels him to submit to Napoleonic tyranny anyway—while taking comfort in the material sublime. The article explores this paradox and concludes by postulating that such a contradiction is characteristic of Romantic-era attitudes toward race and the sublime.

Missverhältnisse. Nietzsche und die Sklaverei

2019 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-67
Author(s):  
Iris Därmann
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
The French Revolution

Abstract Like Hegel, Marx and Engels, Nietzsche has made the Haitian Revolution “unthinkable” (Michel-Rolph Trouillot). He provokes his readers by justifying slavery in the ancient and in the modern world. In order to indicate the problematic dimension of Nietzsche’s cultural legitimation of slavery it is necessary to situate his ideas in the context of the transatlantic slave trade. Furthermore, we need to ask whether his anti-democratic statements regarding the French Revolution could be understood as a “hyper-democratic” commitment to a “coming democracy” (Jacques Derrida) that resists slavery. I raise the question whether Nietzsche, in this context, considers the possibility of overcoming the institution of slavery in modern Europe.

scholarly journals Slaveriets profitabilitet. Økonomi og moral i fransk melodrama om den haitianske revolution, 1792-1798

2014 ◽  
Vol 29 (71) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonas Ross Kjærgård
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Slave Rebellion ◽  
Slave Revolt ◽  
Revolutionary Violence ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
The French Revolution

Jonas Ross Kjærgård: “The Profitability of Slavery. Economy and Morals in French Melodrama on the Haitian Revolution, 1792-1798”This article investigates how French revolutionary melodrama depicted the institution of slavery after the outbreak of the Haitian revolution in 1791. Prior to the slave rebellion in France’s most important Caribbean colony, St.-Domingue (present day Haiti), abolitionary writers and intellectuals had presented the argument that slavery was not only morally wrong but also economically unprofitable. For the more radical writers of the 1770s, such as Abbé Raynal and Louis-Sébastien Mercier, slavery was an evil that called for revolutionary violence in the colonies. However, when news of the actual slave revolt and its violent incidents reached France, the stance on violence and the interconnection of morals and economy changed. Through a reading of three plays the article aims to show that the Haitian revolution – as well as the radicalization of the French revolution – caused play writers to condemn violence among the slaves; to urge rebelling slaves to return to the plantations; and to present a colonial system in which slaves became free workers in return for their promise to work hard and accept the continuation of French colonial rule.

scholarly journals Gender, the novel and the modern order of time

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (34) ◽  
pp. 173-199
Author(s):  
Renata Dal Sasso Freitas
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Frances Burney ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Wanderer ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

This article aims to analyze the 1814 novel The Wanderer, or female difficulties by English writer Frances Burney and how its depiction of Britain at the time of the French Revolution can contribute to the understanding of the emergence of what François Hartog called the modern regime of historicity. Like many authors analyzed by Hartog in his books Regimes of Historicityand Croire en Histoire, Burney was personally affected by the French revolutionary process, a fact that is reflected in her last work. However, the time of its publication – when the Napoleonic Wars were at their end – made it outdated, something that was compounded by the debates regarding the Revolution and issues of gender that it was steeped in. By analyzing this novel, I will argue that issues of gender also played a role in the changes of how men and women related to time at this period as part of the transformations in the concept of History that occurred at the turn of the eighteenth century.

scholarly journals History as a discourse in Jeanette Winterson's "The passion" : the politics of alterity

2000 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 7
Author(s):  
María del Mar Asensio Aróstegui
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
Historical Novels ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Political Choice ◽  
Historiographic Metafiction ◽  
Historical Material ◽  
The Fantastic ◽  
The French Revolution

Set in the historical context of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, Jeanette Winterson's The Passion is an outstanding example of the kind of fiction that Elizabeth Wesseling (1991: vii) calls postmodernist historical novels, that is, "novelistic adaptations of historical material". Besides, being profoundly self-reflexive, the novel also falls under Linda Hutcheon's (1988) category of historiographic metafiction. The present paper focuses on Winterson's political choice of two representatives of historically silenced groups, a soldier and a woman, who use two apparently opposed narrative modes, the historical and the fantastic, to tell a story that both exposes history as a discursive construct and provides an alternative fantastic discourse for the representation of feminine desire.

“Murder, Robbery, Rape, Adultery, and Incest”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Faherty
Keyword(s):  
National Development ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Future ◽  
Before And After ◽  
True Source ◽  
Cultural Mores ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

This essay considers how and why Federalist writers turned to the medium of fiction after the Revolution of 1800 in order to continue to express their concerns about the dangers of a Jeffersonian ascendency and the future of national development. By exploring the connections between rhetorical practices before and after Jefferson’s election, I argue that Federalist writers deployed the same tropes and metaphors to reflect on the loss of their authority despite the shift in genre from newspaper editorial to the novel form. Central to this practice was the use of reflections on the Haitian Revolution which served to represent the instabilities of plantation culture and its capacity to erode cultural mores. The essay focuses on Martha Meredith Read’s Margaretta (1807) as an emblematic example of the ways in which Federalist writers sought to deploy representations of planter decadence as a means of critiquing Jeffersonian power. Yet more than simply critiquing Jeffersonianism, Read also seeks to reframe the tenets of Federalism by advocating that properly ordered domestic spheres are the true source of cultural stability.

Nothing Personal

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel M. Stout
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Logical Consequence ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The People ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
The Right ◽  
The French Revolution

Chapter four looks at Charles Dickens’s 1859 novel, A Tale of Two Cities. By examining parallels between the novel and Robespierre’s political philosophy, this chapter argues that Dickens’s novel understands the French Revolution not as an event that gave individuals the right of self-governance but as the event that formalized a conception of citizenship in which individual persons stand as avatars for the national will. The Revolutionary Terror and the guillotine are thus seen as the logical consequence of a theory of the nation that prioritized the People over individual persons.

Circuits

2019 ◽  
pp. 177-195
Author(s):  
Michelle Burnham
Keyword(s):  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Saint Domingue ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
Secret History

This chapter reads the dynamics of gender and racial violence in Leonora Sansay’s 1808 novel Secret History in transoceanic context. Even as the French Atlantic triangle generated enormous wealth through enormous exploitation, encounters and events in the transnational Pacific were laying bare the unequal terms and coercive relations that underpinned such triangles and the circuits that spun around them. Set in Saint Domingue during the Haitian Revolution, the novel situates the violence of both marital and plantation intimacies within the turning global circuits of sexual-economic drive and their production of disproportion and inequality. By presenting French European and French creole desire in terms of a sexualized colonialism and a pornographic capitalism, Secret History exposes the rotations of capitalist drive as a violent obscenity, and revolution as its violent offspring.

Nation and Generation in A Tale of Two Cities

PMLA ◽  
1978 ◽  
Vol 93 (3) ◽  
pp. 448-462 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albert D. Hutter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Generational Conflict ◽  
The Past ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
Critical Model ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Critical Methods ◽  
The French Revolution

A Tale of Two Cities, the French Revolution becomes a metaphor for the conflicts between generations and between classes that preoccupied Dickens throughout his career. Dickens uses a double plot and divided characters to express these conflicts; his exaggerated use of “splitting”—which the essay defines psychoanalytically—sometimes makes A Tale of Two Cities‘ language and structure appear strained and humorless. We need to locate A Tale of Two Cities within a framework of nineteenth-century attitudes toward revolution and generational conflict by using a combination of critical methods—literary, historical, psychoanalytic. This essay relates the reader's experience to the structure of the text; and it derives from Dickens’ language, characterization, and construction a critical model that describes the individual reader's experience while explaining some of the contradictory assessments of the novel over the past hundred years.

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