Remaps the borders of transatlantic feeling and resituates the role of international memory in U.S. culture in the long nineteenth century and beyond.
In refocusing attention on the Paris Commune as a key event in American political and cultural memory, Sensational Internationalism radically changes our understanding of the relationship between France and the United States in the long nineteenth century. It offers fascinating, remarkably accessible readings of a range of literary works, from periodical poetry and boys’ adventure fiction to radical pulp and the writings of Henry James, as well as a rich analysis of visual, print, and performance culture, from post-bellum illustrated weeklies and panoramas to agit-prop pamphlets and Coney Island pyrotechnic shows. Throughout, it uncovers how a foreign revolution came back to life as a domestic commodity, and why for decades another nation’s memory came to feel so much our own. This book will speak to readers looking to understand the affective, cultural, and aesthetic afterlives of revolt and revolution pre-and-post Occupy Wall Street, as well as those interested in space, gender, performance, and transatlantic print culture. Winner of the 2017 Arthur Miller Centre First Book Prize in American Studies |
Praise for Sensational Internationalism "In the wake of recent world-turning instances of public assembly and occupation from Cairo to St. Louis, the Paris Commune has once again declared its political urgency. Michelle Coghlan's remarkable and virtually unprecedented study--methodologically rich, archivally vast, textually acute--explores the Commune's US afterlives, a long durée of transatlantic feeling, with far-reaching and field-changing results. I've been waiting a long time for such a book."
--Eric Lott, Graduate Center, City University of New York "Skillfully researched and beautifully written, Sensational Internationalism broadens the contours of American cultural and political memory by bringing to life the profound reverberations produced in the States by what was on one level just a very brief moment in someone else’s history: the Paris Commune. Michelle Coghlan’s stunning archive lends her account breadth and authority missing in those that would minimize those effects or limit them to a solely labor phenomenon." -- Kristin Ross, New York University |
EventsNineteenth-Century Research Seminar
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Tasters"Replotting the Romance of Paris: Americans & the Commune"
Arcade colloquy on "Americans in Paris" (Curated by Natalia Cecire) Dream casting who should play C19 firebrands Victoria Woodhull & Lucy Parsons for the My Book, The Movie blog How Sensational Internationalism did on Ford Maddox Ford's "Page 99 Test" "Afterlives of the Paris Commune" (Or, How Sensational Internationalism Came to Be) Age of Revolutions blog |
On Sale Available October 2016 from
Edinburgh UP and Amazon.co.uk (for UK readers) or Oxford UP USA and Amazon.com (for US readers) |