Books by Paul Gilmore

Focuses on American romantic writers' attempts to theorize aesthetic experience through the language of electricity. This work moves between historical and cultural analysis and close textual reading, aiming to challenge readers to see American literature as at once formal and historical and as a product of both aesthetic and material experience.

Examines the interdependence of literary and mass culture at a crucial moment in United States history. This book argues that these figures were manipulated, translated, and adopted not only by authors such as Hawthorne, Thoreau, Cooper, and Melville but also by African American and Native American writers like William Wells Brown and Okah Tubbee.