Aesthetic Materialism: Electricity and American Romanticism

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.

Author: Paul Gilmore
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 01/01/2009
Pages: 256
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.05lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.10w x 0.90d
ISBN: 9780804761239

Review Citation(s):
Chronicle of Higher Education 02/13/2009 pg. 21
Choice 08/01/2009
Reference and Research Bk News 05/01/2009 pg. 273

About the Author
Paul Gilmore, Associate Professor of English at California State University, Long Beach, is also the author of The Genuine Article: Race, Mass Culture, and American Literary Manhood (2001).