"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 nation's 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 thinking-while both shaping and radically
disrupting the literary forms in which they operated.
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