The Vacuum Cleaner: A Cultural Investigation

This book offers an entertaining study of the facts and fantasies associated with the vacuum cleaner as it evolved from a luxury gimmick to a household necessity. The iconic appliance of twentieth-century domestic revolution, the vacuum cleaner stands at the forefront of radical changes in technology, automation, finance, marketing, hygiene, infrastructure, time-management, domestic labour, and the history of dirt. This appliance also insinuates itself into the dominant phobias of the period, including totalitarianism and nuclear war. Maud Ellmann shows how modern literature, art, and other media have transformed this humble domestic mod con into a curmudgeon, windbag, cannibal, vampire, dictator, infanticidal mother, freedom fighter, mantrap, and lothario.

Maud Ellmann is the Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin Distinguished Service Professor of English at the University of Chicago. She has published widely on modernism, literary theory, and psychoanalysis. Her books include The Poetics of Impersonality: T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound; The Hunger Artists: Starving, Writing, and Imprisonment; Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow Across the Page; and The Nets of Modernism: Woolf, James, Joyce, and Freud. She has also edited the Longman anthology Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism and co-edited The Edinburgh Companion to Irish Modernism.