Transformations of Electricity in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Science
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A01=Stella Pratt-Smith
Anonymous Short Stories
Author_Stella Pratt-Smith
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Complex Real World Systems
Contemporary Society
Country's Industrial Productivity
Country’s Industrial Productivity
cultural history of technology
Effective Persuasive Strategy
electrical
Electrical Science
electricity in Victorian literature
Energy Sources
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eq_biography-true-stories
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Faraday's Lines
Faraday’s Lines
Fluid Analogy
George Green
interdisciplinary studies
Investigative Environment
Iwan Rhys Morus
Lead Acid Storage Battery
literary imagination
London Dialectical Society
Lucy Snowe
Nineteenth Century Electrical
Nineteenth Century Investigations
Nineteenth Century Literary
nineteenth-century physics
Popular Science
Popular Science Monthly
Reynolds's Miscellany
Reynolds’s Miscellany
scientific metaphors
Short Fiction
Vice Versa
Victorian science
William Sturgeon
Young Man
Product details
- ISBN 9781472419408
- Weight: 521g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 18 Dec 2015
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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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.
Stella Pratt-Smith is a full-time Lecturer in English at New College, Swindon.
