The omnibus : a cultural history of urban transportation
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
The omnibus : a cultural history of urban transportation
(Palgrave studies in nineteenth-century writing and culture)
Palgrave Macmillan, c2023
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Note
Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
The introduction of omnibus services in the late 1820s revolutionised urban life in Paris, London and many other cities. As the first form of mass transportation-in principle, they were 'for everyone'-they offered large swaths of the population new ways of seeing both the urban space and one another. This study examines how the omnibus gave rise to a vast body of cultural representations that probed the unique social experience of urban transit. These representations took many forms-from stories, plays and poems to songs, caricatures and paintings-and include works by many well-known artists and authors such as Picasso and Pissarro and Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins and Guy de Maupassant. Analysing this corpus, the book explores how the omnibus and horse-drawn tram functioned in the cultural imagination of the nineteenth century and looks at the types of stories and values that were projected upon them. The study is comparative in approach and considers issues of gender, class and politics, as well as genre and narrative technique.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction: Snails on the OmnibusChapter 2: Between Innovation and RegressionChapter 3: Comic CommonplacesChapter 4: The Social Experience of the OmnibusChapter 5: The Omnibus as Political MetaphorChapter 6: Streetcars of DesireChapter 7: An Observatory of PovertyChapter 8: Winged Coursers of the MindChapter 9: Epilogue
by "Nielsen BookData"