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Transformations of Electricity in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Science

DOI link for Transformations of Electricity in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Science

Transformations of Electricity in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Science book

Transformations of Electricity in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Science

DOI link for Transformations of Electricity in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Science

Transformations of Electricity in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Science book

ByStella Pratt-Smith
Edition 1st Edition
First Published 2016
eBook Published 15 May 2017
Pub. location London
Imprint Routledge
DOI https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315550169
Pages 176 pages
eBook ISBN 9781315550169
SubjectsHumanities, Language & Literature
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Pratt-Smith, S. (2016). Transformations of Electricity in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Science. London: Routledge, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315550169

Throughout the nineteenth century, practitioners of science, writers of fiction and journalists wrote about electricity in ways that defied epistemological and disciplinary boundaries. Revealing electricity as a site for intense and imaginative Victorian speculation, Stella Pratt-Smith traces the synthesis of nineteenth-century electricity made possible by the powerful combination of science, literature and the popular imagination. With electricity resisting clear description, even by those such as Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell who knew it best, Pratt-Smith argues that electricity was both metaphorically suggestive and open to imaginative speculation. Her book engages with Victorian scientific texts, popular and specialist periodicals and the work of leading midcentury novelists, including Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, William Makepeace Thackeray and Wilkie Collins. Examining the work of William Harrison Ainsworth and Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Pratt-Smith explores how Victorian novelists attributed magical qualities to electricity, imbuing it with both the romance of the past and the thrill of the future. She concludes with a case study of Benjamin Lumley’s Another World, which presents an enticing fantasy of electricity’s potential based on contemporary developments. Ultimately, her book contends that writing and reading about electricity appropriated and expanded its imaginative scope, transformed its factual origins and applications and contravened the bounds of literary genres and disciplinary constraints.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

chapter 1|35 pages

Creative Sparks

chapter 2|33 pages

Electrical Analogies, Science and Poetry

chapter 3|35 pages

Electrical Practitioners

chapter 4|37 pages

Electrical Shorts

chapter 5|19 pages

Electrical Utopias: Another World

chapter 6|3 pages

Conclusion

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