Haiti’s public image has long vacillated between extremes: from democratic beacon to shadow of insurrection; from space of racial uplift to pit of economic exploitation; from bearer of Enlightenment ideals to dark land of “voodoo.” Indeed the two taglines most commonly associated with Haiti are: “first black republic” and “poorest country in the Western hemisphere.” These opposing taglines fit within a critical paradigm that has long viewed Haiti in terms of example (as a site of universal emancipation and racial equality) and exception (or, in Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s memorable words, the notion that Haiti is “unnatural, erratic, and therefore unexplainable.”) This dissertation engages these two competing figures of Haitian exemplarity and Haitian exceptionalism in early 19th-century literatures of the black Americas. In doing so, I examine Haiti both as an imagined space and as a site of literary production whose products circulated in various and sometimes misleading translations. This network of what I call “translations of Haiti’ re-navigate, and mark with difference, traditional narratives of race and nation. My project reveals how the idea of Haiti flickered through many complex forms in the early 19th-century. Some of these forms fall into the rubric of exception/example but others do not: from sister in democracy, to vanguard of black internationalism, to potential site of exploitation, to occasion for domestic reflection. By nuancing the binary between example and exception, I question critical accounts that depict early representations of the first black republic as either symptomatic of white anxieties or an ideal site for the realization of black nationalist projects. These accounts, I argue, often overlook how national and racial categories failed to overlap; they occlude Haitian (and especially Kreyòl) literary production; and, most importantly, they ignore the complex transnational movements occasioned by this production. I argue that when we consider translation as a metaphor (for example, the notion of translation as an analogical model or heuristic) we must also consider translation as a practice with material consequences. I negotiate between Haiti’s powerful abstraction(s) and a material network of constantly circulating, translated and re-translated texts. These texts, I argue, provoked fears and anxieties, but also speculations, hopes, and visions amongst constantly changing constituents of groups that may or may not be usefully labeled (for example, free U.S. blacks; mulâtres; noirs; U.S. northerners; etc.) Using this shifting international stage as a point of departure, “Translated Subjects” takes Haitian cultural production seriously – that is to say, as more than a convenient metaphor – to reveal new channels of literary exchange.

This dissertation locates the emergence of a modern conception of information in the work of Victorian novelists and novel critics. In a period where the novel is most often understood as a genre interested in depicting total worlds, Victorian novelists lingered on aesthetic and social methods for organizing the informational minutiae that made up such worlds. Novelists developed baroque plots around marriage registers and memos. Even more notably, they conducted research: consulting and creating notebook lists, tabular arrays, archival records, and pre-printed survey forms as strategies for linking the work and the world. In this dissertation, I draw on both literary critical analysis and original archival research to show how the research of Victorian novelists wrestled with the social and aesthetic conventions of abstract data. At its core, my project shows how nineteenth-century definitions of authorship and narrative form emerge from some of the most routinized practices of storage, search and retrieval.

This thesis traces a line of literary experimentation in post-war British literature that was prompted by the aesthetic, philosophical and theoretical demands of abstraction. Spanning the period 1945 to 1980, it observes the ways in which certain aesthetic advancements initiated new forms of literary expression to posit a new genealogy of interdisciplinary practice in Britain. It is the first sustained chronological study to consider the ways in which a select number of British poets, authors and critics challenged the received views of their post-war moment in the discovery of the imaginative and idealizing potential of abstraction. At a time in which Britain became conscious of its evolving identity within an increasingly globalised context, this study accounts for the range of Continental and Transatlantic influences in order to more accurately locate the networks at play. Exploring the contributions made by individuals, such as Herbert Read, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Christine Brooke-Rose, as well as by groups of practitioners, such as the British concrete poetry movement, small press initiatives and Art & Language, this thesis offers a comprehensive account of the evolving status of abstraction across cultural, institutional and literary contexts. The discussions build a vision of an era that increasingly jettisons the predetermined critical lexicon of abstraction to generate works of a more pragmatic abstract inspiration: the spatial demands of concrete poetry, language as medium in the conceptual artwork, the absence of linear plot in the new novel.