Michael Gamper
Elektropoetologie: Fiktionen der Elektrizität. 1740-1870.
Gottingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2009. First edition. 9783835305533 331 pages.
Volume, measuring approximately 6" x 9", is bound in textured dark blue paper spine and boards, with stamped silver lettering to spine. Book and dust jacket are new. Jacket is preserved in mylar cover.
"How can electricity be represented and conceptualized? Literature as a mirror of a scientific phenomenon. Electricity fascinated people like no other scientific phenomenon from the 18th to the early 19th century. Sensational experiments used complex devices and instruments to demonstrate the effects of an invisible and fleeting substance, but a consistent explanation was not possible.
Thus, the evidence of the electrical experiment surrounded a fundamental gap in knowledge, an ignorance of the “nature” and “essence” of electricity. This led to imagination and fiction being given special roles in the exploration of electricity and its potential.
Michael Gamper shows how scientists, writers and poets dealt with the representability of electricity and its consequences for the knowledge of the time, but also gained new insights into the poetics and the status of literature. He examines texts by, among others, Lichtenberg, Novalis, Ritter, Kleist, von Arnim, Hoffmann and Stifter."