Romantic electricity: Fields and currents in recent research

Abstract

Romantic writings about electricity have proved a fruitful topic for recent scholars of the period, and the study of electrical discourse is a fast‐growing interdisciplinary field. This essay offers a survey of the best work on Romantic electricity, focusing on 2 key areas: the ways in which electricity appears as an image of revolutionary activity, and the use of electric imagery in Romantic poetry as a figure for creativity and vitality. In assessing such recent work, this essay argues for the importance of reading Romantic electrical texts within the context of the material experimental cultures of period. Such historical attention reveals that electrical language is amazingly ubiquitous in the Romantic period, and is used in a variety of ways in literary and political texts. Awareness of this rich body of electrical texts offers scholars opportunities to move beyond assigning electricity a particular political valence, and to investigate the operation of electrical language in the work of a wide range of authors.