American Studies Commons^™

"Wires And Lights In A Box": Fahrenheit 451 As A Product Of Postwar Anxiety About Television, Christine V. Shell

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This project discusses the ways in which Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 functions as an indictment of media culture. While many analyses of the novel focus on the text’s sweeping themes of literary censorship, this study instead centers on Bradbury’s depiction of media—particularly television—culture and the ways in which Bradbury feared it could be harmful. Although Bradbury wrote about a future society a century beyond his own, his novel serves as a remarkable reflection of his contemporaneous culture’s media consumption and gendered divisions; this thesis discusses Bradbury’s novel alongside such forces, considering the effects such influences may have had on …