>LITTERARIA PRAGENSIA 2025 (35) 69
ABSTRACT (en)
This essay examines two seemingly different manifestations of shock under the sign of British Romanticism, one associated with electricity and the other associated with mining. In both popular and scientific discourses about electricity, shock named an embodied experience characterized by intense vulnerability and perceptual deactivation. A similar kind of experience was invoked in descriptions of catastrophic mining accidents, as well as in prints of mined landscapes. Attending to mining landscapes and to the language used to report on mining accidents, I argue that industrial resource extraction meaningfully prompted and shaped shock as a category of aesthetic experience in the early nineteenth century.
KEYWORDS (en)
electricity, extraction, industrial accidents, landscape, Romanticism, shock
DOI
https://doi.org/10.14712/2571452X.2025.69.5
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