‘Introduction’ to Genres of Revolt: Literary Afterlives of 1848

This is co-written with Victoria Baena In the history of revolutions, 1848 has often stood as a marker of utopian dreams, though also a symbol of thwarted hopes. As revolutionary actors from Sicily to Paris, from Rome to Budapest, from Martinique to Ceylon, rose up in protest against authoritarian governments and extreme social inequality, demands for abolition, the right to work, national self-determination, and women’s emancipation all were up for re-adjudication. Yet within a few short years, cautious alliances between radical and moderate contingents started to unravel and the revolutionary tide began to ebb, as forces of reaction and repression swept across Europe and beyond. Karl Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), published just as France’s short-lived Second Republic was giving way to a repressive Second Empire, famously described 1848 as a farcical repetition of 1789, thus setting the stage for a historiographical consensus that the year represents nothing so much as failure and defeat. In literary studies, in turn, 1848 has long served as a key inflection point for periodizing modern literary history. Georg Lukács, Jean-Paul Sartre, Roland Barthes, and Raymond Williams all, in different ways, identified 1848 as the high-water mark— but also the beginning of the end—for European literature’s authentic engagement with social change.