Railways and culture in Britain : the epitome of modernity
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Railways and culture in Britain : the epitome of modernity
（Studies in popular culture）
Manchester University Press , Distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave, 2001
- : hbk
- : pbk
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Note
Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
- Volume
-
: hbk ISBN 9780719059650
Description
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? -- .
Table of Contents
- 1. History, modernity, fiction
- Part One: 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 Two: 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 postmodemism?
- Volume
-
: pbk ISBN 9780719059667
Description
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? -- .
Table of Contents
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 -- .
by "Nielsen BookData"
