Power Lines: Electricity in American Life and Letters, - download pdf or read online

At the flip of the 20th century, electrical energy emerged as a metaphor for modernity. Writers from Mark Twain to Ralph Ellison grappled with the belief of electrical energy as either lifestyles strength (illumination) and loss of life spark (electrocution). the concept that electrification created completely sleek stories took carry of usa citizens' imaginations, whether or not they welcomed or feared its adoption. In Power Lines, Jennifer Lieberman examines the it sounds as if incompatible notions of electrical energy that coexisted within the American mind's eye, tracinghow electrical energy turned a typical (though multifarious) image for contemporary existence. Lieberman examines a chain of moments of technical swap while electrical energy gathered new social meanings, plotting either strength strains and the facility of narrative traces in American lifestyles and literature. whereas discussing the social development of electric systems,she bargains a brand new interpretation of Twain's use of electrical energy as an organizing metaphor in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, describes the rhetoric surrounding the discovery of electrical execution, analyzes Charlotte Perkins Gilman's demand human connection in her utopian writing and in her little-known Human Work, considers the subject matter of electric interconnection in Jack London's paintings, and indicates how Ralph Ellison and Louis Mumford persisted the literary culture of electric metaphor. electrical energy was once a particular inspiration in American literary, cultural, and technological histories. therefore, narratives approximately electrical energy have been fairly evocative. Bridging the reasonable and the romantic, the historic and the glorious, those stories guide us to invite new questions about our enduring fascination with electrical energy and all it got here to represent.