Railways and culture in Britain : the epitome of modernity / Ian Carter.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Carter, Ian.

Series:

Studies in popular culture (Manchester, England)

Studies in popular culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature--19th century--History and criticism.

English literature.

Railroad travel in literature.

English literature--20th century--History and criticism.

Railroad travel.

History.

Great Britain--Civilization--19th century.

Great Britain.

Civilization.

Great Britain--Civilization--20th century.

Railroad travel--Great Britain--History.

Railroads--Great Britain--History.

Railroads.

Railroads in literature.

Railroads in art.

Physical Description:

xi, 338 pages : illustrations, maps ; 25 cm.

Place of Publication:

Manchester, UK ; New York : Manchester University Press ; New York : Distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave, 2001.

Summary:

The Nineteenth-Century's steam railway epitomised modernity's relentlessly onrushing advance. In Railways and culture in Britain Ian Carter delves into the cultural impact of train technology, and how this was represented in British society. Why, for example, did Britain possess no great railway novel? The book's first half tests that assertion by comparing fiction and images by some canonical British figures (Turner, Dickens, Arnold Bennett) with selected French and Russian competitors: Tolstoy, Zola, Monet, Manet.

The second half proposes that if high cultural work on the British steam railway is thin, then this does not mean that all British culture ignored this revolutionary artefact. Detailed discussions of comic fiction, crime fiction and cartoons reveal a popular fascination with railways tumbling from vast (and hitherto unexplored) stores of critically overlooked genres. A final chapter contemplates cultural correlations of the steam railway's eclipse. If this was the epitome of modernity, then does the triumph of diesel and electric trains, of cars and planes, signal a decisive shift to postmodernity? This book will be required reading for academics and students in nineteenth and twentieth-century British social history, as well as cultural studies and sociology. It will also be of great interest to train enthusiasts and crime fiction fans.

Contents:

1 History, modernity, fiction 1

Part I In the Canon

2 Rain, steam and what? 51

3 Eight great pages: Dombey and Son 71

4 'Death by the railroad': Anna Karenina 100

5 Railway life: La Bete Humaine 117

6 Accident: new English life? 143

Part II Beyond the Canon

7 Crime on the line 167

8 Crime on the train 202

9 'The lost idea of a train': comic fiction 240

10 Train Landscape: Eric Ravilious, William Heath Robinson and Rowland Emett 261

11 Return ticket to postmodernism? 292.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0719059658

0719059666

OCLC:

46907590