Romantic electricity, or the materiality of aesthetics

American Literature

Volumn 76, Issue 3, 2004, Pages 467-494

  Gilmore, Paul ^a  

^a CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 51349163663     PISSN: 00029831     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00029831-76-3-467     Document Type: Review

References (47)

1. Winfried Fluck, "Aesthetics and Cultural Studies," in Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age, ed. Emory Elliott, Louis Freitas Caton, and Jeffrey Rhyne (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002), 84-85
2. Review of Papers on Literature and Art, by S. Margaret Fuller, American Whig Review, November 1846, 515-16
3. Elizabeth Peabody, "The Word 'Aesthetic,'" Aesthetic Papers (Boston: Peabody, 1849), 1
4. Peabody, "The Word 'Aesthetic,'" Aesthetic Papers, 3, 2
5. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford, Eng.: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 8, 13, 15; further references to this source will be cited parenthetically as IA
6. As Isobel Armstrong contends, Eagleton's theme is thus in the end "[n]othing less than the impossibility of the category of the aesthetic" (The Radical Aesthetic [Oxford, Eng.: Basil Blackwell, 2000], 16)
7. Ian Hunter, "Aesthetics and Cultural Studies," in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 348
8. on Max Raphael, see Michèle Barrett, Imagination in Theory: Culture, Writing, Words, and Things (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1999)
9. There are, of course, plenty of idealist defenses of the aesthetic that reject the need to treat aesthetic experience as the product of particular sociohistorical conditions; see Martha C. Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995)
10. Mark Edmundson, Literature against Philosophy, Plato to Derrida: A Defence of Poetry (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995)
11. Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1999)
12. Jan Mukarovský, Aesthetic Function, Norm, and Value as Social Facts, trans. Mark E. Suino (Ann Arbor: Dept. of Slavic Languages and Literature, Univ. of Michigan, 1970), 3
13. Henry T. Tuckerman, Artist-Life; or Sketches by American Painters (New York: Appleton, 1847)
14. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Poet" (1844), in Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Library of America, 1983), 467
15. Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), in The Portable Margaret Fuller, ed. Mary Kelley (New York: Penguin, 1994), 293
16. and Edgar Allan Poe, "The Man of the Crowd" (1840), in Poetry and Tales, ed. Patrick F. Quinn (New York: Library of America, 1984), 388
17. On the importance of associationist thought to American literary nationalism, see Robert E. Streeter, "Association Psychology and Literary Nationalism in the North American Review, 1815-1825," American Literature 17 (November 1945): 243-54
18. and William Charvat, The Origins of American Critical Thought, 1810-1835 (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1936)
19. Bern Dibner, Oersted and the Discovery of Electromagnetism, 2d ed. (New York: Blaisdell, 1962), 57
20. Iwan Rhys Morus, Frankenstein's Children: Electricity, Exhibition, and Experiment in Early-Nineteenth-Century London (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1998), 9
21. Maria M. Tatar, Spellbound: Studies on Mesmerism and Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1978), 58-59, 71
22. See Chris Baldick, In Frankenstein's Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-Century Writing (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987)
23. and Mark Kipperman, "Coleridge, Shelley, Davy, and Science's Millennium," Criticism 40 (summer 1998): 409-36
24. "A Defence of Poetry," in The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck, 10 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1926-1930), 7:122,140
25. Shelley, "The Refutation of Deism" (1814), in Complete Works, ed. Ingpen and Peck, 6:50
26. On Shelley's interest in science, especially in electricity as a central principle in his attempt to negotiate between his materialist and idealist tendencies, see Kipperman, "Coleridge, Shelley, Davy"; Carl Grabo, A Newton among Poets: Shelley's Use of Science in "Prometheus Unbound" (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1930)
27. Alan Richardson, British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001)
28. and Edward S. Reed, From Soul to Mind: The Emergence of Psychology, from Erasmus Darwin to William James (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1997)
29. Baldick, Frankenstein's Shadow, 105
30. Thomas Jefferson Hogg, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley (New York: Dutton, 1933), 51, 52
31. Shelley, "Defence of Poetry," Complete Works, 7:140
32. On Byron's and Shelley's more material understanding of words as things, see William Keach, "'Words Are Things': Romantic Language and the Matter of Poetic Language," in Aesthetics and Ideology, ed. George Levine (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1994), 219-39
33. Eric Wilson's work on Emerson's engagement with electromagnetic science exemplifies this tendency to read American romanticism as following in Coleridge's footsteps at the same time that it broke from that lineage; see Emerson's Sublime Science (New York: St. Martin's, 1999), 11
34. For a different account of electromagnetism and antebellum American literature, see Deandra Little, "'The Body Electric': American Literature and the Culture of Electromagnetism, 1750-1855" (PhD diss., Vanderbilt University, 2001)
35. "Influence of the Telegraph upon Literature," United States Democratic Review, May 1848, 411
36. Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself," Poetry and Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan (New York: Library of America, 1996), 28. Further references to Whitman's poems are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text as PP. Whitman mentions the telegraph twice in the 1855 version of Leaves of Grass (Poetry and Prose, 97,144)
37. For an account of scientific explorations of the connection between electricity and the nervous system, see John D. Spillane, The Doctrine of the Nerves: Chapters in the History of Neurology (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1981)
38. William F. Channing, "On the Municipal Electric Telegraph; Especially in Its Application to Fire Alarms," American Journal of Science and Arts, 2nd ser., 13 (January 1852): 58-59
39. Channing echoes Samuel Morse's 1838 prediction that "the whole surface of this country would be channeled for those nerves which are to diffuse, with the speed of thought, a knowledge of all that is occurring throughout the land" (Samuel F. B. Morse: His Letters and Journals, ed. Edward Lind Morse, 2 vols. [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914], 2:85)
40. From the 1840s through the 1860s, such analogies were prominent in explaining both the telegraph and the body. As a copiously illustrated article in Harper's reveals, the human nervous system was conceived as "present[ing] a very curious analogy" to a telegraphic system ("What Are the Nerves?" Harper's New Monthly Magazine, May 1862,758-59)
41. Henry W. Parker, "Von Blixum's Heroic Experiment," American Whig Review, March 1846, 290; further references to this source will be cited parenthetically in the text as "VB."
42. See Russ Castronovo, "The Antislavery Unconscious: Mesmerism, Vodun, and 'Equality,'" Mississippi Quarterly 53 (winter 1999-2000): 41-56
43. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, ed. J. Lyndon Shanley (1854; reprint, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1971), 118, 119
44. Douglass speaks of flashes of thought at least twice in the original 1845 version of his autobiography (The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass [New York: Library of America, 1994], 58)
45. "The Trials and Triumphs of Self-Made Men: An Address Delivered in Halifax, England, on 4 January 1860," The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One: Speeches, Debates, Interviews, ed. John W. Blassingame, 5 vols. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979-1992), 3:292
46. Douglass, Narrative (1845), 95
47. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1962), 36