By S. Halliday
This leading edge publication finds the total volume of electricity's importance in 19th- and early-twentieth-century tradition. Ranging throughout an enormous array of fabrics, Sam Halliday exhibits how electrical energy functioned as either a way of representing "other" things--from love and team spirit to embodiment and temporality--and as an item of illustration in its personal correct. in addition to Hawthorne, Melville, Twain and James, the booklet considers different significant American writers comparable to Whitman, Margaret Fuller and Henry Adams; English writers resembling Hardy and Kipling; and a galaxy of scientists and social commentators, together with mesmerists, physicians, conspiracy theorists, psychologists and theologians.
Read or Download Science and Technology in the Age of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and James: Thinking and Writing Electricity (American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century) PDF
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Extra resources for Science and Technology in the Age of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and James: Thinking and Writing Electricity (American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century)
Sample text
We order it by wire and get it only twenty hours after cutting. My husband sees to it that it is put on a special train” (611). The “wire” and railroad are thus made to work in tandem, with each being called upon to produce its special effects: the telegraph to execute an order over distance; the “special train” to freight goods in as little time as possible. This episode allows us to make two general points. First, one notices the emphatically temporal dimension of the space-effacing procedures the episode describes.
32 By the century’s end, then, it had become possible to learn exactly when a given train was due to run within the parameters of any given national railway network, especially in the more industrial areas of the United States and Western Europe. 35 The trick that Gumbrecht misses, however, like Thoreau, is that trains do not invariably run to schedule. On the contrary, the dread phenomenon of the late, delayed, or cancelled train ensures a further element of contingency that may consist in any given experience of railway travel.
Nonetheless, the eventual success of this campaign, the fact that its members are constantly forced to occupy the “nick of time,” and the various stratagems (such as Godalming’s series of messages from Lloyds) used by the conspirators, all go toward making Dracula a novel of what one might call the logistical sublime; a sublimity that is emphasized by the very technical glitches that occasionally disrupt the best laid plans of its protagonists. Dracula himself is a contributor to this effect: all his plans, as Jonathan Harker realizes, have been “carefully thought out, and done systematically and with precision” (291).
