Haitian writing, Dash argues, has been held together less by any shared aesthetic creed than by the problem successive generations set themselves: how a small, constantly defamed republic could produce a literature of its own.

The nineteenth-century survey shows patriotic verse curdling into flattery of presidents once the split between Christophe and Petion hardened, then a group of young intellectuals around the papers Le Republicain and L'Union borrowing from French Romanticism to argue, as early as 1836, for writing rooted in local life and in the culture of the peasantry. Movements usually dismissed as imitative, La Ronde above all, are read here as serious answers to the same question rather than as failures of nerve.

The American occupation sharpens everything. Older writers answered the marines with ornate French eloquence as a form of self-defence, while a younger generation turned prosaic and irreverent, and documentary novels by Laleau and Alexis turned on an elite that had accommodated the invaders.