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PART I. Contextualising Domestic Electrical Appliances in the Cultural Imagination -- Introduction: Time-Saving Domestic Appliances, Modernity, and the American Century: A Case for the Significance of a Literary Trope -- 1.'Oh So Beautiful is the MixMaster': Appliances in Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sinclair Lewis, and Gertrude Stein -- Part II. Mechanisms of Containment: Cold War-Era Literary Responses to the 'All-Electric' Home -- 2. 'Everything in the Ice Box': Appliances in Jack Kerouac and Beat Culture -- 3. 'The Lamentation of a Vacuum Cleaner': Appliance Disappointments in John Cheever and Richard Yates -- Part IV. Gadgets of Protest: Feminism and Civil Rights Short-Circuit the 'All-Electric' Home -- 4. 'I'm a Toaster With a Cunt': Radical Feminist Appliances in Marge Piercy -- 5. 'If a N***** Buys a Woman a Washing Machine': Appliances and Race in Post-War African American Fiction -- PART V. Appliances, Techno-utopianism, and Hyperreality -- 6. 'Like Being Attacked' by a Vacuum Cleaner?: Appliances in Post-War Science Fiction -- 7. 'The Angel of Death Pushes a Vacuum Cleaner': Postmodernist Appliances in Kurt Vonnegut and Don DeLillo -- Conclusion: Appliances, Contemporary Culture, and Twenty-First Century Nostalgia for the 1950s -- Bibliography -- Index. "This book is the first-ever study of the representation of domestic time-saving electrical appliances in twentieth-century 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 across a range of literary genres and forms published between the early 1910s, as Fordism and Taylorism entered the home, and the 2010s, as contemporary writers consider the enduring material and spiritual effects of these objects into the twenty-first century. Rachele Dini argues that literary scholarship has too long ignored the influence of electrification on literary form, and of domestic electrification on the literary representation of home and on shifting understandings of the relationship between the home, body, and nation. Dini further argues that the appropriation and subversion of the rhetoric of domestic electrification comprised a crucial, but overlooked, element in specific twentieth-century literary forms and genres including postmodernist fiction, science fiction, and second-wave feminist fiction. All-Electric? Narratives thus demonstrates the extent to which American writers over the last century have enlisted appliances to raise questions about gender norms and sexuality, racial exclusion and erasure, class anxieties, the ramifications of mechanisation and the potential replacement of humans by robots, 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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