Synopses & Reviews
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?
Review
...intriguing...
Library Journal
Synopsis
The 19th-century steam railway epitomized modernity's relentlessly onrushing advance. Ian Carter delves into the cultural impact of the train. Why, for example, did Britain possess no great railway novel? He compares fiction and images by canonical British figures (Turner, Dickens, Arnold Bennett) with selected French and Russian competitors: Tolstoy, Zola, Monet, Manet. He argues that while high cultural work on the British steam railway is thin, British popular culture did not ignore it. 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.
Synopsis
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.
About the Author
Ian Carter is Professor of Sociology at the University of Auckland.
Table of Contents
History, Modernity, Fiction *
Part I: In the Canon * Rain, Steam and What? * Eight Great Pages: Dombey and Son * "Death by the Railroad": Anna Karenina * Railway Life: La Bête Humaine * Accident: New English Life? *
Part II: Beyond the Canon * Crime on the Line * Crime on the Train * "The Lost Idea of a Train": Comic Fiction * Train Landscape: Eric Ravilious, William Heath Robinson, and Rowland Emett * Return Ticket to Postmodernism?