Electricity and Imagination: Post-romantic Electrified Experience and the Gendered Body. An Introduction

Abstract

In this introduction, I evoke the poetic force and spectacular experiences of electricity in the 19th century. Electricity is taken here as a specific subject for “science and imagination studies”, an inter‐ and multidisciplinary perspective that takes into account the history of science, medicine and technology as well as literature, theatre studies and dance studies, among other disciplines. The envisioned approach is inclusive, and the sciences are not considered to have a privileged perspective on electricity. Indeed, I question common diffusionist models and I plead for more methodological exchange between disciplinary approaches to electricity. In the special issue, electricity is analyzed both as a concept traversing a diversity of contexts and as a phenomenon that was carefully staged. Besides introducing the four contributions that follow on the introduction, I briefly explore relevant related themes, including the reception history of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the electrified dances of Loie Fuller, the electrical fairy. I show that the experience of electricity and the gendered body are common themes of the special issue and that their study is indeed crucial for understanding 19th century electrical imaginaries.

Romantic electricity: Fields and currents in recent research

“…Like Coleridge and Southey, then, Merry's electrical enlightenment seems to shade into a more disruptive set of associations. Koen Vermeir () notes that in the 19th century “electricity can also be a disturbing power that can never be subsumed under strict laws and comes to stand for disruption and disunity. Similarly, electricity can be a conservative or a radical political force; it can project into the future utopias as well as dystopias” (p. 148) .…”

“…Despite Shelley's focus on the “ineffable” processes of poetic practice, electricity enables material forms of collectivity, communication, and animation. His appropriation of electrical discourse is thus as politically engaged as that produced a generation earlier, though it does perhaps mark the high point of such utopian visions of an electrical future; as Vermeir () notes, the enabling ambiguity of the mysterious operations of electricity becomes less potent as electricity is better understood in the later part of the 19th century (pp. 141–142).…”

Electric light and the visualization of Catholic power in Spain during the Restoration Era (1874–1931)

“…(Morus 1998; Wosk 2001; Gooday 2008, 197–219). On the “interpretative flexibility” of electricity, see Vermeir 2016.…”