All-Electric Narratives: Time-Saving Appliances and Domesticity in American Literature, 19452020

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Winner of the 2023 Emily Toth Award for Best Single Work in Womens Studies All-Electric Narratives is the first in-depth study of time-saving electrical appliances in American literature. It examines the literary depiction of refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, oven ranges, washing machines, dryers, dishwashers, toasters, blenders, standing and hand-held mixers, and microwave ovens between 1945, when the all-electric home came to be associated with the nations hard-won victory, and 2020, as contemporary writers consider the enduring material and spiritual effects of these objects in the 21st century. The appropriation and subversion of the rhetoric of domestic electrification and time-saving comprises a crucial, but overlooked, element in 20th-century literary forms and genres including Beat literature, Black American literature, second-wave feminist fiction, science fiction, and postmodernist fiction. Through close-readings of dozens of literary texts alongside print and television ads from this period, Dini shows how U.S. writers have unearthed the paradoxes inherent to claims of appliances capacity to give back time to their user, transport them into a technologically-progressive future, or return them to some pastoral past. In so doing, she reveals literary appliances role in raising questions about gender norms and sexuality, racial exclusion and erasure, class anxieties, the ramifications of mechanization, the perils and possibilities of conformity, the limitations of patriotism, and the inevitable fallacy of utopian thinkingwhile both shaping and radically disrupting the literary forms in which they operated.

Reviews

A welcome addition to the field of Literary Objects Study. The lavish illustrations, mostly commercial ads, may present the good life as a universal right, but the reader finds out that literary representations of electrical appliances tell a different story. * Review of International American Studies *
For readers who do not care about the Post45s coherence as a field, which, to be honest, will be most readers, All-Electric Narratives provides both a useful history of the American appliance and a wide range of close readings to support scholarship and teaching in any of the subfields it covers. * Ancillary Review of Books *
In this marvelous and magnetic new book, Rachele Dini reshapes our understanding of literature and technology from the mid-20th century through the present day. She weaves together technology studies, literary analysis, and feminist theory to craft crucial readings about the devices that dominate our domestic spaces and, by extension, our lives. Brilliantly written and expertly argued, this is a fascinating new book on the intersection of literature and technology in American culture. * Jennifer L. Lieberman, Associate Professor of American Literature and Culture, University of North Florida, USA, and author of Power Lines: Electricity in American Life and Letters, 1882-1952 *
Rachele Dini brings fresh perspectives and insight to the study of American consumer culture. Calling on extensive research in a wide range of mid-20th-century fiction, and reading her literary sources against contemporary magazine advertising and historical studies, she offers an intriguing and eye-opening analysis of electric appliances and of the very ideas of saving time and labor. A stimulating and important book, All-Electric Narratives deepens our understanding of domestic life in contemporary consumer culture. * Susan Strasser, Richards Professor Emerita of American History, University of Delaware, USA, and author of Never Done: A History of American Housework *
In this illuminating and often revelatory study of 20th Century literary critiques of the utopian ideology of all-electric living, Rachele Dini demonstrates how a wide range of literary forms and practitioners have employed time-saving domestic appliances as literary tropes to contest the normative social roles and behaviors they have spawned and promoted. * Tim Raphael, Professor of Arts, Culture and Media, Rutgers University, Newark, USA, and author of The President Electric: Ronald Reagan and the Politics of Performance *
Rachele Dinis "All-Electric" Narratives is an original and energetic book that offers a fresh, revealing angle of vision on the work of an impressive array of writers, from Jack Kerouac to Paule Marshall to A.M. Homes. Once you see the poetics of electrification as illuminated by Dini, you wont be able to un-see it. * Jane Elliott, Reader in Contemporary Literature, Culture and Theory, King's College London, UK, and author of Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory: Representing National Time and The Macroeconomic Mode: Political Subjectivity and Contemporary Popular Aesthetics *
A tour de force! Using her superb skills as a literary critic, Rachele Dini examines how American creative writers, from the Beat poets to the postmillennial novelists, reacted to the gap between media-induced expectations of all-electric homes and the realities of their (and our) everyday lives within those homes. Pushing beyond literary criticism, Dini also argues that their insightful reflections on how modern appliances have structured domestic work, can help us all imagine other, more liberating and equitable ways to get that necessary work done. * Ruth Schwartz Cowan, Janice and Julian Bers Professor, Emerita, University of Pennsylvania, USA, and author of More Work For Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave and A Social History of American Technology *
All-Electric Narratives crackles with the energy of big ideas and astute observation. With a detectives eye and a cultural historians range, Rachele Dini illuminates the central role that modern appliances and domestic electrification have in U.S. fiction from 1945 to today. It is fitting that in a book about electric currents and connectivity, Dini moves deftly between print ads and literary genres, between consumer history, new materialist theory, and literary criticism. This is a must-read for anyone interested in American fiction, but also for readers curious about toasters, blenders, microwaves, and the many gadgets that have long shaped the American home. Through its expansive investigation of efficient devices, "All-Electric" Narratives rethinks the very nature of time-saving; it is a book to linger over. * Sarah Wasserman, Associate Professor of English, University of Delaware, USA, and author of The Death of Things: Ephemera in the American Novel *

Author Bio

Rachele Dini is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Roehampton, UK. She is the author of Consumerism, Waste, and Re-use in Twentieth-century Fiction: Legacies of the Avant-Garde (2016) and founder of the International Literary Waste Studies Network.