Sensational Internationalism

'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 minimise those effects or limit them to a solely labour phenomenon.'Kristin Ross, New York University
Remaps the borders of transatlantic feeling and resituates the role of international memory in US 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.
J. Michelle Coghlan teaches American literature at the University of Manchester, UK.
Cover image: Paris and the Commune, Sackett & Wilhelms Litho. Co., c1891, theatrical poster collection (Library of Congress)
Cover design:
[EUP logo] edinburghuniversitypress.com [please note new web address]
ISBN 978-1-4744-1120-2Barcode

J. Michelle Coghlan teaches American literature at the University of Manchester, UK. Her work on cultural memory, sensation, queer economies of desire, and American literature of the long nineteenth century has appeared in journals and edited books, including Arizona Quarterly, The Henry James Review, Transforming Henry James and Must Read: Rediscovering American Bestsellers. She recently guest edited the "Tasting Modernism" special issue of Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities.

Introduction: Revolutionary Preoccupations: Or, Transatlantic Feeling in a Radical Sense; 1. Framing the Pe-troleuse: Postbellum Poetry & the Visual Culture of Gender Panic; 2. Becoming Americans in Paris: The Commune as Frontier in Turn-of-the-Century Adventure Fiction; 3. Radical Calendars: The Commune Rising in Postbellum Internationalism; 4. Tasting Space: Sights of the Commune in Henry James's Paris; 5. Re-staging Horror: Insurgent Memories of the Commune in the 1930s; Epilogue: Barricades Revisited: the Commune on Campus from FSM to SDS; Notes; Bibliography.