Aesthetic materialism : electricity and American romanticism / Paul Gilmore.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Gilmore, Paul, 1970-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--19th century--History and criticism.

American literature.

Authors, American--19th century--Aesthetics.

Authors, American.

Electricity in literature.

Telegraph in literature.

Romanticism--United States.

Romanticism.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (404 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, c2009.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Aesthetic Materialism: Electricity and American Romanticism focuses on American romantic writers' attempts to theorize aesthetic experience through the language of electricity. In response to scientific and technological developments, most notably the telegraph, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century electrical imagery reflected the mysterious workings of the physical mind as well as the uncertain, sometimes shocking connections between individuals. Writers such as Whitman, Melville, and Douglass drew on images of electricity and telegraphy to describe literature both as the product of specific economic and social conditions and as a means of transcending the individual determined by such conditions. Aesthetic Materialism moves between historical and cultural analysis and close textual reading, challenging readers to see American literature as at once formal and historical and as a product of both aesthetic and material experience.

Contents:

Introduction : the word "aesthetic"

Idealist aesthetics and the republican telegraph

Aesthetic electricity

Frederick Douglass's electric words : aesthetic politics and the limits of identification

Mad filaments : Walt Whitman's aesthetic body telegraphic

Conclusion : aesthetic electricity caged.

Notes:

"Parts of Chapter 3 were originally published in ATQ, Volume 16, No. 4, December 2002. Reprinted by permission of The University of Rhode Island."--T.p. verso.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [219]-235) and index.

ISBN:

9780804770972

0804770972

OCLC:

793166848