Milton, Haiti and Revolutionary Tragic Thought

'There are books that shimmer with fresh critical insight. And there are books that model meticulous scholarship. Crawforth has written one of the rare books that does both of these things… I expect that it will be widely read and acclaimed.' Feisal Mohamed, Professor of English, Yale University
'In this wide-ranging and methodologically original study, two distinct historical moments, separated by a century and a half, the English and the Haitian revolutions, are thought together through the mediation of a third: Greek tragedy in fifth century Athens. Drawing on recent scholarship emphasizing the political character of Greek tragedy, Hannah Crawforth shows how such thought becomes an instrument of the political in revolutionary moments, registering the disasters of the present and the possibilities of the future, especially in the figure of Toussaint L'Ouverture. A particularly interesting aspect of this study is the attachment of political ideas to iconic figures in Greek tragedy: Theseus (democracy); Creon (tyranny); Prometheus (slavery); Heracles (empathy). While the book will engage scholars of Milton, the great theorist of the English Revolution, it will appeal to a wider audience awake to the concerns of our moment.' Gordon Teskey, Francis Lee Higginson Professor of English Literature, Harvard University
'Hannah Crawforth's acute and imaginative book asks how historical moments might speak to one another across time. Intertwining the English and Haitian Revolutions, John Milton, C. L. R. James, Édouard Glissant and many others through acts of 'radical intertextuality,' Crawforth compellingly combines historical rigour, conceptual breadth and creative experimentation in order to reclaim tragedy as a political force, in the past and the present.' Joe Moshenska, Professor of English Literature, University of Oxford
'Milton, Haiti and Revolutionary Tragic Thought is a daring, even audaciously daring, interdisciplinary study of interconnections among Athenian tragedy, Milton's revolutionary poetry and prose, and the life and writings of C.L.R. James's tragic hero of Haiti's revolution, Toussaint L'Ouverture. It is also delightfully original in presenting transhistoricism in ways that attend to the specificities of different historical and literary contexts. Crawforth proceeds by way not of argument but of evocative juxtaposition of visual artifacts, historical documents, and literary texts. Informed by contemporary reflections on the tragic character of decolonizing movements, this study makes all the “thought” it so illuminatingly touches readily accessible to its readers.' Mary Nyquist, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Toronto
'Milton, Haiti and Revolutionary Tragic Thought is a brilliant and creative actualization of C.L.R. James's prescriptive admonishment that “speculative thought” is the only thought worth doing: a “conversation” between theories of tragedy, Milton's corpus, and the Haitian revolutionary works of James, Césaire, and Glissant organized around critical-interstitials on Theseus, Creon, Prometheus, and Heracles. Crawforth's rigorous analytic reminds us that Milton's reception, the Haitian Revolution, and Attic-tragedy itself were always already insurgently internationalist. This is carefully plotted scholarship as critical montage of the highest order.' Jeremy Matthew Glick, Professor of African Diasporic Literature, Hunter College, City University of New York