PART I. Contextualising Domestic Electrical Appliances in the Cultural Imagination
Introduction: Time-Saving Domestic Appliances, Modernity, and the American Century: A Case for the Significance of a Literary Trope
1.'Oh So Beautiful is the MixMaster': Appliances in Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sinclair Lewis, and Gertrude Stein
Part II. Mechanisms of Containment: Cold War-Era Literary Responses to the 'All-Electric' Home
2. 'Everything in the Ice Box': Appliances in Jack Kerouac and Beat Culture
3. 'The Lamentation of a Vacuum Cleaner': Appliance Disappointments in John Cheever and Richard Yates
Part IV. Gadgets of Protest: Feminism and Civil Rights Short-Circuit the 'All-Electric' Home
4. 'I'm a Toaster With a Cunt': Radical Feminist Appliances in Marge Piercy
5. 'If a N***** Buys a Woman a Washing Machine': Appliances and Race in Post-War African American Fiction
PART V. Appliances, Techno-utopianism, and Hyperreality
6. 'Like Being Attacked' by a Vacuum Cleaner?: Appliances in Post-War Science Fiction
7. 'The Angel of Death Pushes a Vacuum Cleaner': Postmodernist Appliances in Kurt Vonnegut and Don DeLillo
Conclusion: Appliances, Contemporary Culture, and Twenty-First Century Nostalgia for the 1950s
Bibliography
Index