Bloomsbury Academic “All-Electric” Narratives: Time-Saving Appliances and Domesticity in American Literature, 1945–2020

“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. Review "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 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, author of Never Done: A History of American Housework; Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market; and Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash Rachele Dini’s "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 won’t be able to un-see it. --Jane Elliot, Reader in Contemporary Literature, Culture and Theory, King's College London, UK About the Author 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.