Description
Book SynopsisFocuses on American romantic writers' attempts to theorize aesthetic experience through the language of electricity. This work moves between historical and cultural analysis and close textual reading, aiming to challenge readers to see American literature as at once formal and historical and as a product of both aesthetic and material experience.
Trade Review"Paul Gilmore demonstrates that electricity was central to the discourse of American Romanticism, illuminating both the individual's place in society and the relationship of the soul to the body. After reading
Aesthetic Materialism, one understands far better what Whitman meant when he 'sang the body electric.'" —David Nye, University of Southern Denmark
"Paul Gilmore's book stands forth as an indispensable critical work in dealing with the history, transatlantic dimensions, and political promises of American Romantic literature."
—Russ Castronovo, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Table of ContentsContents Introduction: The Word "Aesthetic" 000 1.Idealist Aesthetics and the Republican Telegraph 000 2. Aesthetic Electricity 000 3. Frederick Douglass's Electric Words: Aesthetic Politics and the Limits of Identification 000 4. Mad Filaments: Walt Whitman's Aesthetic Body Telegraphic 000 Conclusion: Aesthetic Electricity Caged 000 Notes 000 Works Cited 000 Index 000
