Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Acknowledgments -- Table of Contents -- Introduction: The Word "Aesthetic" -- CHAPTER ONE - Idealist Aesthetics and the Republican Telegraph -- Electric Aether and Associationism -- Coleridge's Electricity and Romantic Ideology -- Republican Electricity and Idealist Aesthetics -- Morse's Republicanism and Idealist Associationism -- Morse's Electricity, Spiritual and Material -- The Universal Telegraph and the Telegraphic World Body -- The Northern Brain of Humanity, or A Common Language of the World -- The Useful and the Beautiful -- CHAPTER TWO - Aesthetic Electricity -- The Electric Chain Wherewith We Are Darkly Bound: Byron -- Poetry is a Sword of Lightning: Percy Shelley's Romantic Electricity -- Nathaniel Hawthorne's Soap-Bubble Anti-Aesthetic -- Melted Wires: "Von Blixum's Heroic Experiment" and the Limits of Telegraphic Communion -- Vile Falsifying Telegraphs of Me: Melville's 'Pierre' 1 -- Tinglingness: Melville's 'Pierre' 2 -- Electric Insight: Melville's 'Pierre' 3 -- A Citizen of Somewhere Else and a Citizen of the World: Hawthorne and Thoreau -- CHAPTER THREE - Frederick Douglass's Electric Words: Aesthetic Politics and the Limits of Identification -- Electric Streams and Feeling Right: Stowe and Sentimental Abolitionism -- Our Ally Lightning: Douglass and Techno-Utopianism -- Machinery & Transcendentalism Agree Well: Emersonian Aesthetics and Politics -- My Soul's Complaint: Douglass's Aesthetic Turn -- The Quivering Flash of Angry Lightning: "The Heroic Slave" -- CHAPTER FOUR - Mad Filaments: Walt Whitman's Aesthetic Body Telegraphic -- "Always the procreant urge": The Merge of Electric Sex -- "As Brides and Bridegrooms": Equality and Difference -- "The Drift of It Everything": Linguistic and Corporeal Gaps -- "All Diffused": Organic Identity.

"Not Express'd in Parlors and Lecture-Rooms": The Auction Block Scenes -- "The Likes of the Parts of You": The Final Catalogue -- Conclusion: Aesthetic Electricity Caged -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index.