The 19th-century's steam railway epitomized modernity's relentlessly onrushing advance. In this work 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 work's first half tests that assertion by comparing fiction and images by some canonical British figures (Turner, Dickens, Arnold Bennett) against 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?
By:
Ian Carter
Series edited by:
Jeffrey Richards
Other:
Rebecca Mortimer
Imprint: Manchester University Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 234mm,
Width: 156mm,
Spine: 19mm
Weight: 499g
ISBN: 9780719059667
ISBN 10: 0719059666
Series: Studies in Popular Culture
Pages: 352
Publication Date: 04 September 2001
Audience:
General/trade
,
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
ELT Advanced
,
A / AS level
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
1. History, modernity, fiction Part 1: In the Canon 2. Rain, steam and what? 3. Eight great pages: Dombey and Son 4. 'Death by the railroad': Anna Karenina 5. Railway life: La Bete Humaine 6. Accident: new English life? Part 2: Beyond the Canon 7. Crime on the line 8. Crime on the train 9. 'The lost idea of a train': comic fiction 10. Train Landscape: Eric Ravilious, William Heath Robinson and Rowland Emett 11. Return ticket to postmodernism Index -- .
Ian Carter is Professor of Sociology at University of Auckland
Reviews for Railways and Culture in Britain: The Epitome of Modernity
'This is an important, agenda-setting work. The quality of the scholarship is very high'. Dr Ralph Harrington, University of York
