Aesthetic materialism; electricity and American Romanticism.

9780804761239

Aesthetic materialism; electricity and American Romanticism.

Gilmore, Paul.

Stanford U. Press

2009

242 pages

$60.00

Hardcover

PS217

Walt Whitman's "Sing the Body Electric" metaphor from his epic Leaves of Grass poem stems from the technology of the time, according to Gilmore (English, California State U., Long Beach). After tracing the term "aesthetics" back to Elizabeth Peabody's Aesthetic Papers (1849), he analyzes aesthetic images of electricity, the telegraph, and other technological developments from earlier British Romanticism to those of American Romantic writers including Whitman, Herman Melville, and Frederick Douglass. Portions of the chapter on Douglass were originally printed in a 2002 issue of the literary journal ATQ.

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