| Author |
Rudy, Jason R. |
| Year |
2009 |
| Publisher |
Athens, OH: Ohio UP |
| Number of pages |
232 |
| ISBN |
9780821418826 |
| Keywords |
|
Abstract
Amazon (2013):
In Electric Meters: Victorian Physiological Poetics Jason R. Rudy connects formal
poetic innovations to developments in the electrical and physiological sciences, arguing
that the electrical sciences and bodily poetics cannot be separated, and that they
came together with special force in the years between the 1830s, which witnessed the
invention of the electric telegraph, and the 1870s, when James Clerk Maxwell’s electric
field theory transformed the study of electrodynamics.
Combining formal poetic analysis with cultural history, Rudy traces the development
of Victorian physiological poetics from the Romantic poetess tradition through to
the works of Alfred Tennyson, the “Spasmodic” poets, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Gerard
Manley Hopkins, and Algernon Swinburne, among others. He demonstrates how poetic rhythm
came increasingly to be understood throughout the nineteenth century as a physiological
mechanism, as poets across class, sex, and national boundaries engaged intensely and
in a variety of ways with the human body’s subtle response to rhythmic patterns. Whether
that opportunity for transcendence was interpersonal or spiritual in nature, nineteenth–century
poets looked to electricity as a model for overcoming boundaries, for communicating
across the gaps between sound and sense, between emotion and thought, and—perhaps—between
individuals in the modern world.
