Fatal Revolutions: Natural History, West Indian Slavery, and the Routes of American Literature (2012)
Iannini, Christopher P. (Author)
University of North Carolina Press
Physical Details: ix + 296 pp.; ill.
Language: English
Drawing on letters, illustrations, engravings, and neglected manuscripts, Christopher Iannini 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. Iannini 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. In fact, eighteenth-century natural history as a literary genre largely took its shape from its practice in the Caribbean, an oft-studied region that was a prime source of wealth for all of Europe and the Americas. The formal evolution of colonial prose narrative, Ianinni argues, was contingent upon the emergence of natural history writing, which itself emerged necessarily from within the context of Atlantic slavery and the production of tropical commodities. As he reestablishes the history of cultural exchange between the Caribbean and North America, Ianinni recovers the importance of the West Indies in the formation of American literary and intellectual culture as well as its place in assessing the moral implications of colonial slavery.
...MoreReview Madison, Mark (2015) Review of "Fatal Revolutions: Natural History, West Indian Slavery, and the Routes of American Literature". Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 190-191).
Similar Citations
Book
Katherine Johnston;
(2022)
The Nature of Slavery: Environment and Plantation Labor in the Anglo-Atlantic World
(/isis/citation/CBB692394504/)
Thesis
Iannini, Christopher Paul;
(2004)
Fatal Revolutions: United States Natural Histories of the Greater Caribbean, 1707--1856
(/isis/citation/CBB001562072/)
Book
Daniel B. Rood;
(2017)
The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery: Technology, Labor, Race, and Capitalism in the Greater Caribbean
(/isis/citation/CBB583326394/)
Article
Aguilera-Manzano, José María;
(2008)
Slavery and Medicine in the Caribbean at the End of the Ancien Régime
(/isis/citation/CBB001030537/)
Article
John Stewart;
(2020)
Chemistry and Slavery in the Scottish Enlightenment
(/isis/citation/CBB766765131/)
Book
Paton, Diana;
Forde, Maarit;
(2012)
Obeah and Other Powers: The Politics of Caribbean Religion and Healing
(/isis/citation/CBB001252862/)
Article
Weaver, Karol K.;
(2012)
Surgery, Slavery and the Circulation of Knowledge in the French Caribbean
(/isis/citation/CBB001251768/)
Book
Julius Sherrard Scott;
(2018)
The Common Wind: Afro-American currents in the age of the Haitian Revolution
(/isis/citation/CBB631076423/)
Book
Newman, Simon P;
(2013)
A New World of Labor: The Development of Plantation Slavery in the British Atlantic
(/isis/citation/CBB001422269/)
Article
Kate Ramsey;
(2021)
Powers of Imagination and Legal Regimes against “Obeah” in the Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century British Caribbean
(/isis/citation/CBB140553807/)
Article
John E. Crowley;
(2016)
Sugar Machines: Picturing Industrialized Slavery
(/isis/citation/CBB194086091/)
Book
Schiebinger, Londa L.;
(2004)
Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World
(/isis/citation/CBB000750941/)
Book
Emily Senior;
(2018)
The Caribbean and the Medical Imagination, 1764-1834: Slavery, Disease and Colonial Modernity
(/isis/citation/CBB827308732/)
Article
Nogueira, André;
(2012)
Universos coloniais e “enfermidades dos negros” pelos cirurgiões régios Dazille e Vieira de Carvalho
(/isis/citation/CBB001420626/)
Article
Burnard, Trevor;
Follett, Richard;
(2012)
Caribbean Slavery, British Anti-Slavery, and the Cultural Politics of Venereal Disease
(/isis/citation/CBB001212674/)
Article
J'Nese Williams;
(2021)
Plantation Botany: Slavery and the Infrastructure of Government Science in the St. Vincent Botanic Garden, 1765–1820
(/isis/citation/CBB785011260/)
Article
Murphy, Kathleen S.;
(2013)
Collecting Slave Traders: James Petiver, Natural History, and the British Slave Trade
(/isis/citation/CBB001320636/)
Chapter
Eleonora Rohland;
(2016)
Hurricanes on the Gulf Coast: Environmental Knowledge and Science in Louisiana, the Caribbean, and the United States, 1722–1900
(/isis/citation/CBB324310996/)
Book
Janice Neri;
Tara Nummedal;
John V. Calhoun;
(2019)
John Abbot and William Swainson: Art, Science, and Commerce in Nineteenth-Century Natural History Illustration
(/isis/citation/CBB493788298/)
Article
Bleichmar, Daniela;
(2006)
Painting as Exploration: Visualizing Nature in Eighteenth-Century Colonial Science
(/isis/citation/CBB000631064/)
Be the first to comment!