Fatal revolutions : natural history, West Indian slavery, and the routes of American literature / Christopher P. Iannini
Published
Chapel Hill : Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, [2012]
Strange things, occult relations : emblem and narrative in Hans Sloane's Voyage to- Jamaica -- Fatal latitudes : the poetics of West Indian "improvement" in Mark Catesby's Natural history of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands -- "The itinerant man" : Crèvecoeur's Caribbean, Raynal's revolution, and the fate of Atlantic cosmopolitanism -- "All the West-Indian weeds" : William Bartram's Travels and the natural history of the Floridas -- Notes on the state of Virginia, the Haitian Revolution, and the return of epistolarity -- The birds of America and the specter of Caribbean accumulation -- Humboldt's Havana
Summary
Drawing on letters, illustrations, engravings, and neglected manuscripts, this book connects two dramatic transformations in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world - the emergence and growth of the Caribbean plantation system and the rise of natural science. It argues that these transformations were not only deeply interconnected, but that together they established conditions fundamental to the development of a distinctive literary culture in the early Americas
