Railways and culture in Britain

The epitome of modernity

By: Ian Carter, Jeffrey Richards (Editor)

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Paperback | 1 September 2001

At a Glance

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354 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
23.4 x 15.6 x 1.8

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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.

Industry Reviews

...intriguing... "Library Journal"

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List of illustrations	p. x
General editor's foreword	p. xiii
Acknowledgements	p. xiv
History, modernity, fiction	p. 1
In the Canon
Rain, steam and what?	p. 51
Eight great pages: Dombey and Son	p. 71
'Death by the railroad': Anna Karenina	p. 100
Railway life: La Bete Humaine	p. 117
Accident: new English life?	p. 143
Beyond the Canon
Crime on the line	p. 167
Crime on the train	p. 202
'The lost idea of a train': comic fiction	p. 240
Train Landscape: Eric Ravilious, William Heath Robinson and Rowland Emett	p. 261
Return ticket to postmodernism?	p. 292
Index	p. 325
Table of Contents provided by Syndetics. All Rights Reserved.

Railways and culture in Britain

The epitome of modernity

At a Glance

Paperback

Industry Reviews

Shipping

How to return your order

Defective items

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