Dissertation

No god but electricity: American literature and technological enthusiasm in the Electrical Age, 1893-1939

Essid, Joe

1993

Overview

When Grover Cleveland pushed a button to start the machinery at the 1893 Columbian Exposition, observers reported that America's Electrical Age had begun. For a few decades afterward, and in spite of World War I and the Great Depression, Americans were lured by the prospect of a clean, all-electric utopia. Only the blackouts of the Second World War and the uncertainties of the Nuclear Age would begin to dim that incandescent promise. Amid the surge of national enthusiasm and boosterism about electricity and electrical technologies, many American writers and culture critics scrutinized these beliefs and warned that the progress of the Electrical Age might seriously disrupt the established patterns of American life, or even threaten society's very existence. This dissertation examines such literary resistance by focusing on the cultural contexts which generated and conditioned writers' responses. Ironically, like electrical resistors that continue to conduct part of the current they are intended to abate, most of the literature considered here simultaneously testifies to and perhaps inadvertently participates in the corporate and public enthusiasm for technology even as it aims to check the public surrender. This intense conflict in the era's literature, between resistance and enthusiasm, provides the focal point for this study. Recent scholarship, such as that of Thomas P. Hughes and David E. Nye, has focused more on technological transformation than on the literary responses to it. This dissertation does not recapitulate these or other scholars' narratives of America's electrification and its culture heroes; instead, my study scrutinizes some of the same technological and social changes through the lens of American literature. My comparison of both \"high\" and \"trade\" texts proceeds from and supports the New Historicist notion that literary and non-literary texts are created within the parameters of a larger culture, or for the Electrical Age, within the national circuit.

• Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Subject: American history / American literature / Lewis, Harry Sinclair (1885-1951) / Science history / Twain, Mark (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) (1835-1910)
• ISBN: 9798644998968