Aesthetic materialism
Subtitle: electricity and American romanticism
By: Paul Gilmore.
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2009
Place of publication: Stanford, Calif
Language: eng
Number of pages: 242
ISBN-13: 9780804761239
Subjects: American literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism; Authors, American -- 19th century -- Aesthetics; Electricity in literature; Telegraph in literature; Romanticism -- United States
Description: "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."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction : the word "aesthetic"; title: Idealist aesthetics and the republican telegraph; title: Aesthetic electricity; title: Frederick Douglass's electric words : aesthetic politics and the limits of identification; title: Mad filaments : Walt Whitman's aesthetic body telegraphic; title: Conclusion : aesthetic electricity caged.