Power Lines: Electricity in American Life and Letters, 1882–1952

Electricity was and is one of the first ‘modern’ technologies, the conjuring of a mystical power by science, harnessed to industry and social ends. Lieberman takes a unique approach to the study of electricity, making a literary analysis of major authors including Mark Twain, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Ralph Ellison to trace electricity as a metaphor in American thought, and as an early exemplar of the technological system. This approach blends close reading of texts from literary giants with a theoretically sophisticated approach to the history of technology, and the potential interpretive flexibility of emerging technologies.

This is a book on a very specific subject (I was encouraged to read it by the author), and if you don’t want to know more about a literary approach to electricity, well, it may not appeal. But in that remit, it is extremely well done.